Scaling Borderlands 4: Cloud Builds, CI/CD, and the Hidden Costs of Success
Three years after discussing Gearbox's cloud-based build pipeline with the P4 team, Steve Fortier and Phillip Peterson return to share what happened as Borderlands 4 grew from a secret project into a live game. As the team grew to support more branches, patches, and ongoing content, they encountered new challenges in P4, AWS, TeamCity, and Unreal Game Sync that only emerged on a massive scale.
From symbol servers and workspace management to AWS storage and snapshot performance, they walk through the troubleshooting process behind several unexpected bottlenecks.
The result is a candid look at how Gearbox manages millions of files, scales build infrastructure across AWS, and keeps development moving on a modern live-service game.
In this episode:
💥 Scaling the infrastructure behind Borderlands 4
💥 Managing 7+ million files and terabyte-scale build environments
💥 Using AWS, TeamCity, P4, and Unreal Engine to accelerate development
💥 Solving hidden bottlenecks in storage, syncing, and build automation
💥 Lessons learned from debugging large-scale cloud infrastructure
💥 Best practices for monitoring, cost management, and scaling DevOps teams
💥 Career advice for aspiring build and pipeline engineers
Timestamps:
[00:00:00] Open
[00:02:55] Welcome and recap
[00:04:58] Pipeline stack overview
[00:05:36] Cloud shift and distributed teams
[00:07:21] Borderlands 4 scale jump
[00:09:18] UGS editor build explosion
[00:11:32] Symbols bottleneck hits
[00:12:28] Moving symbols to AWS
[00:14:17] NGINX caching for symbols
[00:17:26] Branch sprawl and workspace size
[00:20:14] Snapshotting workspaces for faster builds
[00:22:41] Branch Explosion Bottleneck
[00:23:30] Workspace Metadata Crisis
[00:25:13] Partitioned Workspace Pitfalls
[00:25:38] Phantom File Sync Bug
[00:27:44] Publish Step Mystery
[00:28:35] Chasing Red Herrings
[00:31:00] EBS Snapshot Throttle Revealed
[00:33:31] Pooling Volumes Fix
[00:35:50] Scaling After Ship
[00:38:10] Time Travel Lessons
[00:40:19] Advice for Newcomers
[00:42:48] Closing