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Show HN: WarpBuild – x86-64 and arm GitHub Action runners for 30% faster builds

warpbuild.com

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Re: Show HN: WarpBuild – x86-64 and arm GitHub Action runners for 30% faster builds

#11

Post by switchbak »

jeffbee wrote: post #2

How do people rationalize using a service like this for anything other than toy projects? Sending your source code to some service, then adopting and executing the artifacts it produces, means this is the central, most critical aspect of your security story. For real projects it doesn't stand even a moment's scrutiny.

In this world of SaaS, we're already sharing many of our crown jewels with other services anyway. Hosted DB's, auth services - this is just another in a long line. Some might say that data is more important than a snapshot of the code anyway (depends on the domain).

Call me old school, but I'm with you. A vendor would have to be exceptionally well regarded over a long time to get my trust in such a scenario.

Re: Show HN: WarpBuild – x86-64 and arm GitHub Action runners for 30% faster builds

#12

Post by suryao »

nwienert wrote: post #7

It’s a great idea. I’d want even faster though, GitHub Actions are quite a bit slower than my Air M2. If you spun up a fleet of top of the line Hetzner boxes I’d expect it’d be 100% faster than actions. 30% faster for half cost is just a bit too small of a gain to make the leap.

There are 2 factors here:

1) I was being conservative on my promises. For instance, we have users who reported GHA runtimes going down from ~25m to ~9m [1] 2) Local builds have the amazing advantage of being able to cache subsequent runs. CI workflows are ephemeral. This introduces a performance penalty. However, we are working on something that automagically caches some builds, especially container builds, that would enable huge benefits of 2x-10x further.

Hope this clarifies!

[1] https://x.com/suryaoruganti/status/1730419264132370556

Re: Show HN: WarpBuild – x86-64 and arm GitHub Action runners for 30% faster builds

#13

Post by btown »

Congrats on the launch! There do seem to be a number of other entrants in this space: https://github.com/neysofu/awesome-github-actions-runners#li...

What makes you stand out from the pack? The VM approach seems very cool - is this unique in the space? Do you have different approaches that provide speedups or security benefits not possible with other third party runner systems? Any benchmarks against competitors?

Separately, I'm curious about how you address VM startup speed. Do you boot VMs on demand, or do you have a pool of booted VMs awaiting jobs?

Anyways, it's exciting to see new approaches in the space! Wishing you and the team the best of luck!

Re: Show HN: WarpBuild – x86-64 and arm GitHub Action runners for 30% faster builds

#15

Post by suryao »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #9

> The runners are allocated on VMs, not containers. This provides faster performance What? I haven't benchmarked it lately, but containers should (almost?) always have less overhead and better performance than VMs (I do agree that VMs are far more flexible and let you do privileged things; it's only perf that I question)

From a first-principles perspective, the stack is as follows:

VMs on warpbuild: baremetal > hypervisor for VM > runner workload Container: baremetal > (cloud VM [1]) > k8s worker node OS > containerd > container OS > runner workload

This assumes containers are running on k8s, which is an okay assumption in this case. The perf penalty of using a VM is much lower.

Note: if you are referring to the VM spin up time, then it is a whole other story and we have taken some pains to mitigate that to achieve comparable spinup time.

[1] if using a non-bare metal ec2/gce instance, say

Re: Show HN: WarpBuild – x86-64 and arm GitHub Action runners for 30% faster builds

#16

Post by jeffbee »

switchbak wrote: post #11
jeffbee wrote: post #2

How do people rationalize using a service like this for anything other than toy projects? Sending your source code to some service, then adopting and executing the artifacts it produces, means this is the central, most critical aspect of your security story. For real projects it doesn't stand even a moment's scrutiny.

In this world of SaaS, we're already sharing many of our crown jewels with other services anyway. Hosted DB's, auth services - this is just another in a long line. Some might say that data is more important than a snapshot of the code anyway (depends on the domain). Call me old school, but I'm with you. A vendor would have to be exceptionally well regarded over a long time to get my trust in such a scenario.

It's easier to imagine that Microsoft isn't going to monkey with your private data, and that they in all likelihood have a 24x7 security team actively prowling around looking for intruders. But a fly-by-night outfit has no reputation at stake and probably has no ability to realize that their whole junk has been pwned by Chinese intelligence or whomever.

Re: Show HN: WarpBuild – x86-64 and arm GitHub Action runners for 30% faster builds

#17

Post by suryao »

mdaniel wrote: post #14

What's the story with the LICENSE file in this repo https://github.com/WarpBuilds/warpbuild-agent/blob/main/cmd/... > which is not only zero bytes but also down in a subdirectory?

That was oversight. Fixed it - thanks for pointing it out.

Re: Show HN: WarpBuild – x86-64 and arm GitHub Action runners for 30% faster builds

#18

Post by Sytten »

We are currently on Buildjet and it has made significant difference for our rust builds. But I would change in a heartbeat for Windows and even more for MacOS support. Mind you only if it is per minute pricing. The GitHub Actions macos machines are sooo bad that anything else at this point I will take.

Re: Show HN: WarpBuild – x86-64 and arm GitHub Action runners for 30% faster builds

#19

Post by suryao »

Sytten wrote: post #18

We are currently on Buildjet and it has made significant difference for our rust builds. But I would change in a heartbeat for Windows and even more for MacOS support. Mind you only if it is per minute pricing. The GitHub Actions macos machines are sooo bad that anything else at this point I will take.

We have a few users who were using BuildJet try us out and they like it. It's an easy switch if you want to check it out.

Re: Show HN: WarpBuild – x86-64 and arm GitHub Action runners for 30% faster builds

#20

Post by Sytten »

jeffbee wrote: post #2

How do people rationalize using a service like this for anything other than toy projects? Sending your source code to some service, then adopting and executing the artifacts it produces, means this is the central, most critical aspect of your security story. For real projects it doesn't stand even a moment's scrutiny.

I am not sure I see the problem. There is a business with a reputation behind that service. There is a contract and it no different than a contract with another provider like GitHub.

Who are you to judge "real projects" BTW? It might not suit your security profile, but it might for other businesses that have different security concerns.

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