At a high level, a job describes some actions to perform when dependent resources change (or when manually triggered). For example, you may define a job that runs your unit tests whenever new code is pushed to a repository.

Jobs can be thought of as functions with inputs and outputs, that automatically run when new inputs are available. A job can depend on the outputs of upstream jobs, which is the root of pipeline functionality.

The definition of actions to perform is done via a Build Plan, which is a very powerful composition-based DSL that can express anything from running simple unit tests to running a matrix of tasks and aggregating the result.

Builds

An instance of execution of a job's plan is called a build. A build can either succeed or fail, or error if something unrelated to your code goes wrong (i.e. if one of your workers falls off the face of the earth).

When a build runs, the job's plan is realized. Each step described by the job's plan is executed, and so long as all Tasks succeed, the build succeeds. If a task fails, the build fails, and its resources do not propagate to the rest of the pipeline.

The containers running in a build can be accessed while they're running (and also shortly after they finish) via fly intercept, which can greatly help in debugging.