blob VS garden

> Bazel has remote execution and remote caching as built-in features. Hey - those are built-in features of modern CI systems too! So here's a thought experiment: if I define a build system in Bazel and then define a server-side Git push hook so the remote server triggers Bazel to build, run tests, and post the results somewhere, is that a CI system? I think it is! A crude one. But I think that qualifies as a CI system.

Bazel can be a pain. Integration with external package managers is unnatural, hermetic toolchains are tricky, naively-written rules end up using system-provided utilities, breaking reproducibility.

But the remote execution API (besides feeling like magic) lets you treat your CI as "just another user" by design, unning the same `bazel test //...` or whatever else. This means

- the CI DSL/YAML files tend to have mostly publishing and other CI-specific information in then (this feels right)

- you get to debug your build pipeline locally

- you are actually testing the ability of a new user to pull the repo, build, and have everything just work. There is no special CI build environment that users implicit have to match.

- tangentially: the remote execution API is beautiful in its simplicity:

https://github.com/bazelbuild-remote-apis/blob/master/build/...

Hey there! Have you tried garden.io for caching? We also cache tests. Pretty much anything that's possible to cache. We're open source at https://github.com/garden-io/garden

To add to what's already been said: If you think about it, CI pipelines are typically a complete description of how your system is built, tested, and deployed.

Which is pretty fantastic except for how walled off they are. You can't really re-use these descriptions for e.g. development, they're not vendor agnostic, and they only way to run them is by pushing your code.

Maybe it's a silly analogy but it's almost like being a web dev that doesn't have a browser and needs to send their code to a friend who can tell them if that font size looks good.

I think we're way over due for freeing these "blueprints" of our system from the confines of CI and making them portable and flexible. And containers are the technology that's enabling that.

Full disclaimer (as always): I work at Garden[0] where we're also solving that problem but taking a slightly different approach to Dagger (it's still a DAG). Garden config is declarative and the jobs (we call them actions) have a semantic meaning. You can e.g. have a Build action of type container or a Deploy action of type Helm and Garden will figure out what to do with it.

[0] https://github.com/garden-io/garden

Yes, there's us over at https://github.com/garden-io/garden! We're big believers in pipelines that run anywhere. I even made a short little video that should give you the gist. [1]

Some of the short-list of differences: we use YAML for our configuration language, Dagger can use full-fat languages to define its pipelines. Our feature scope is broader: you can use us to vend IDP-like stacks to your developers if you're a Platform Team; we make development with remote Kubernetes clusters very easy, including all the remote image builds; and we have a number of integrations so you can bring your IaC tool of choice (Pulumi, Terraform) into your pipeline and set up service -> infra dependencies.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JFnan6s2cDg

Me too. In fact Garden (dev tooling for the Kubernetes)[0] is a Berlin start-up with three Icelandic founders.

And if I'm not mistaken, two of us worked briefly with @halldorel (above commenter) at an earlier Icelandic start-up. It's a small world (if you're Icelandic).

[0] https://garden.io

There are dedicated tools just for that. Apart from skaffold check also tilt.dev, garden.io, devspace.sh, okteto.com

Would appreciate any insights on garden.io. Thanks.

Telepresence, tilt, garden.io, okteto, skaffold etc.

- https://garden.io/

haha, do my pictures give off a strong not-web-dev vibe? Either way your right, I'm focusing on devxp and automation for kubernetes. Because my work is open source you can see it here https://github.com/garden-io/garden (btw we're also hiring another open core dev like me)