EREricBurnett·Jun 4, 2021
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 action
Read the rest
s 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...