CI on bare metal gaming CPUs

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Summary:
In this episode, host Kaivalya Apte speaks with Ayush from Blacksmith about the challenges of Continuous Integration (CI) and how Blacksmith addresses these issues by providing serverless compute solutions for GitHub Actions. They discuss the unique advantages of using gaming CPUs, the importance of observability in CI, and the future of CI workloads.

Takeaways

Blacksmith optimizes CI workloads by using serverless compute.
Gaming CPUs provide better performance for CI tasks.
Flakiness in CI systems can be addressed with better infrastructure.
Observability helps developers understand CI failures.
Instant compute availability is crucial for efficient CI.
The user journey with Blacksmith is designed for quick setup.
CI workloads are often bursty and require flexible resources.
Traditional hyperscalers are not ideal for CI workloads.
Blacksmith aims to reduce the time to value for CI jobs.
The future of CI involves fast feedback loops and high-quality testing.

Chapters:

00:00 Introduction to Blacksmith and CI Challenges
03:38 The Case for Serverless CI
07:58 User Journey with Blacksmith
13:18 Instant Compute Availability
17:30 Optimizing File Systems for CI
23:01 The Power of Gaming CPUs
24:57 The Evolution of Consumer Desktop Performance
26:43 Cost Dynamics in Consumer vs. Server CPUs
29:20 Scaling CI Workloads in Multi-Tenant Systems
32:25 Optimizing CI Infrastructure with Firecracker
35:31 Understanding Flakiness in CI Workloads
39:40 Enhancing Observability in CI Systems
42:06 Future Directions for CI and Observability

References and Links:
This post by Marc Brooker (of AWS fame) talks about the unit economics of resource pooling in serverless environments.
This is the firecracker GitHub org which contains the main firecracker project as well as some SDKs.
This is an amazing talk on ZFS, which is the file system abstraction we started off with to create copy-on-write clones for our VMs.

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