Every minute added to your CI pipeline costs real money and real developer time. At ~45 MRs per day and ~340 pipeline runs, a single minute of pipeline overhead translates to nearly 6 hours of lost engineering time daily. This talk presents the complete playbook we used to reduce our Merge Train pipeline from about an hour to about 22 minutes — a ~64% reduction — while improving CI health from the low 80s to the low 90s percent. Covering compute instance migration (with real benchmark data from 10 runs per configuration), service test extraction, CloudWatch optimisation, linter caching, flaky test detection, and cost analysis, attendees leave with a prioritised framework for their own CI optimisation efforts. Every optimisation includes before-and-after metrics, cost impact, and the trade-offs we navigated.
This talk has been presented at JSNation 2026, check out the latest edition of this JavaScript Conference.
