Distributed Cloud Builds for Everyone

This page summarizes the projects mentioned and recommended in the original post on news.ycombinator.com

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  • llama

  • llama is the project being discussed, a platform for pushing work to the cloud, using Lambda to do the work.

    https://github.com/nelhage/llama

    My question is how much upload bandwidth this needs. The article linked here mentions it in passing, but that's always been the pain point for things like this for me.

  • remote-apis

    An API for caching and execution of actions on a remote system.

  • Very nice! I really like the ease-of-use of this, as well as the scale-to-zero costs. That's a tricky thing to achieve. Seems like it could become a standard path to ease the migration from local to remote builds.

    If the author is interested in standardizing the same, I'd suggest implementing the REAPI protocol (https://github.com/bazelbuild/remote-apis). It should be amenable to implementing on a Lambda-esque back-end, and is already standard amongst most tools doing Remote Execution (including Bazel! Bazel+llama could be fun). And equally, it's totally usable by a distcc-esque distribution tool (recc[1] is one example) - that's also what Android is doing before they finish migrating to Bazel ([2], sadly not yet oss'd).

    The main interesting challenge I expect this project to hit is going to be worker-local caching: for compilation actions it's not too bad to skip assuming the compiler is built into the container environment, but if branching out into either hermetic toolchains or data-heavy action types (like linking), fetching all bytes to the ephemeral worker anew each time may prove to be prohibitive. On the other hand, that might be a nice transition point to switch to persistent workers: use a lambda backed solution for the scale-to-0 case, and switch execution stacks under the hood to something based on reused VMs when hitting sufficient scale that persistent executors start to win out.

    (Disclaimer: I TL'd the creation of this API, and Google implementation of the same).

    [1] https://gitlab.com/BuildGrid/recc

    [2] https://opensource.googleblog.com/2020/11/welcome-android-op...

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  • recc

  • Very nice! I really like the ease-of-use of this, as well as the scale-to-zero costs. That's a tricky thing to achieve. Seems like it could become a standard path to ease the migration from local to remote builds.

    If the author is interested in standardizing the same, I'd suggest implementing the REAPI protocol (https://github.com/bazelbuild/remote-apis). It should be amenable to implementing on a Lambda-esque back-end, and is already standard amongst most tools doing Remote Execution (including Bazel! Bazel+llama could be fun). And equally, it's totally usable by a distcc-esque distribution tool (recc[1] is one example) - that's also what Android is doing before they finish migrating to Bazel ([2], sadly not yet oss'd).

    The main interesting challenge I expect this project to hit is going to be worker-local caching: for compilation actions it's not too bad to skip assuming the compiler is built into the container environment, but if branching out into either hermetic toolchains or data-heavy action types (like linking), fetching all bytes to the ephemeral worker anew each time may prove to be prohibitive. On the other hand, that might be a nice transition point to switch to persistent workers: use a lambda backed solution for the scale-to-0 case, and switch execution stacks under the hood to something based on reused VMs when hitting sufficient scale that persistent executors start to win out.

    (Disclaimer: I TL'd the creation of this API, and Google implementation of the same).

    [1] https://gitlab.com/BuildGrid/recc

    [2] https://opensource.googleblog.com/2020/11/welcome-android-op...

NOTE: The number of mentions on this list indicates mentions on common posts plus user suggested alternatives. Hence, a higher number means a more popular project.

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