remote-apis

In the case of the Remote Execution/Cache API used by Bazel among others[1] at least, it's a bit more detailed. There's an "ActionCache" and an actual content-addressed cache that just stores blobs ("ContentAddressableStorage"). When you run a `gcc -O2 foo.c -o foo.o` command (locally or remotely; doesn't matter), you upload an "Action" into the action cache, which basically said "This command was run. As a result it had this stderr, stdout, error code, and these input files read and output files written." The input and output files are referenced by the hash of their contents, in this case, and they get uploaded into the CAS system. Most importantly you can look up an action in the ActionCache without actually running it, provided you have the inputs at hand. So now when another person comes by and runs the same build command, they say "

Not only it's distributed like distcc, Bazel also provide sandboxing to ensure that environment factors does not affect the build/test results. This might not mean much for smaller use cases, but at scale with different compiler toolchains targeting different OS and CPU Architecture, the sandbox helps a ton in keeping your build result accurate so that it could be cached remotely (like using ccache). On top of it, the APIs Bazel uses to communicate with the remote execution environment is standardized and adopted by other build tools with multiple server implementation to match it. Looking into https://github.com/bazelbuild/remote-apis/#clients, you could see big players are involved: Meta, Twitter, Chromium project, Bloomberg while there are commercial supports for some server implementations. Finally, on top of C/C++, Bazel also support

I would suggest also looking at https://github.com/bazelbuild/remote-apis. Its essentially a standard API for remote (any binary) execution as a service and there are several reference implementations of it (Buildgrid, BuildBarn, Google's own service etc). And you can consider using gVisor to minimize container breakouts to a great extent.