In many previous jobs, we saw ourselves keep hitting refresh on GitHub for 10 minutes just to wait for a test to finish, to be able to merge some simple PR.
As most devs know, regardless of how much you try to multitask, it always seems that an unnecessary bottleneck is waiting for the CI to finish.
For us, when the project reaches a certain level of complexity we always ended up migrating to a self-hosted CI. However, it was always an extra effort to set it up and maintain it.
In process of repeatedly doing so throughout our careers, we realized that existing CIs run their jobs on a Cloud VM which hardly goes beyond 3 GHz, but our dev laptop can easily boost to 5GHz, finish the same build in half of the time.
So we came up with the idea of inventing a new CI that instead of paying cloud providers for their overpriced VMs, we build jobs on the latest Zen2, Zen3, 10th gen Intel desktop CPUs, as well as EPYC server CPUs with up to 64 vCPU and 128G of RAM if you have builds which can make use of that.
In addition to this, we developed our own VM hypervisor management solution based on libvirt. Which acts as the key orchestrator of all the VMs and makes sure that you get a VM as soon as you push to a branch.
Hope you enjoy the speed as much as we do.
Best,
BuildJet team