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By adapting Flare.Build’s advanced caching and CDN technology to tools beyond Bazel, Bitrise can speed up feedback loops, iterate faster, and multiply app build performance by up to 10x.
We’re happy to announce the acquisition of Flare.Build — the first company outside of Google to offer software solutions to power build and test pipelines based on Bazel. As of today, Flare joins Bitrise to further enhance your mobile app impact — providing you with the ability to build — and maintain — high-quality mobile apps on one single platform.
For those not familiar, Bazel is the popular and powerful multi-language, multi-platform build system open-sourced by Google. With the acquisition of Flare.Build, you can now benefit from the first true Bazel-native CI system to maximize your Bazel ROI by unlocking untapped potential not fully realized before. Here’s how.
For those using Bazel
If you're not using Bitrise for CI/CD, but want robust Bazel backend services, we can help. Our current offering supports two primary teams: 1) teams on Bazel not currently utilizing Bitrise CI, and 2) teams on Bazel currently utilizing Bitrise CI—the first true Bazel-native CI system.
1. Teams on Bazel not utilizing Bitrise CI
If you’re not already a Bitrise user, but are using Bazel, you can now come to Bitrise to access a turn-key solution for build analytics (powered by Bazel’s Build Event Protocol), distributed builds, and a performant build cache and CDN, regardless of what CI provider you use. Compared to other tools or services in the market, the Flare Bazel services running on Bitrise infrastructure (or your own) can unlock maximum performance at the highest scale that remains unmatched.
With near-instant feedback of builds and tests, as well as being able to access these systems from any environment (cloud, dev machine), mobile teams can expect improved development quality, reduced risk, and an overall boost of productivity.
2. Teams on Bazel utilizing Bitrise CI
Bitrise customers utilizing Bazel in their workflows can now benefit from the first true Bazel-native CI system due to the deep integration of Flare’s Bazel backend systems and the Bitrise platform. This means improved performance, reduced costs, and a cohesive, integrated user experience. Teams can look forward to improved productivity by eliminating infrastructure & tooling fragmentation so often experienced with scale—with CI, Bazel, infrastructure and IT operations in one place. Mobile engineers can also connect to these systems directly from their workstations to benefit from the Bazel services provided by Bitrise to enhance local development workflows and improve the developer experience.
iOS dev teams, in particular, stand to benefit from the combination of Bitrise’s industry-leading macOS compute infrastructure, mobile-first CI/CD environment with specialized features and tooling, and Bazel remote build execution, as this previously required costly manual integration and maintenance.
For those using native or alternative build tools
Not all mobile teams are interested in utilizing Bazel. For them, the Flare technology will provide the backbone for powerful performance enhancements to mobile application CI workflows running on Bitrise. This will enable some of the same benefits of Bazel enjoyed by industry leading engineering teams.
As Barnabás Birmacher, CEO of Bitrise, puts it:
"Flare has built an exceptional and highly optimized piece of tech that is flexible enough to adapt to other build tools and achieve similar performance gains. As we always strive to eliminate the gap between change and feedback as much as possible without the expensive overhead for teams, this puts us in a unique position to further our ambition as Mobile DevOps leaders.”
What to expect from the new CI workflow functionality on Bitrise:
- Performance - faster builds & tests means more releases
- A fast, affordable, fully managed and drop-in replacement for Gradle Enterprise build cache for all Gradle users
- Fast build artifact storage for other iOS tools such as Tuist and XCRemoteCache
- A fast generic build artifact cache available to all users of Bitrise
- Build insights - understand your build graph, find bottlenecks, and manage flaky tests
- Build & test analytics on the Bitrise platform for users of Xcode via XCMetrics
- Other features TBA
The benefits of having Mobile DevOps in one single platform
By combining mobile CI, Bazel, infrastructure, and IT operations all in one place, Bitrise helps teams focus on shipping great products instead of spending costly cycles managing and integrating developer tools and infrastructure. We do this by providing you with an ideal, fully-integrated platform to propel faster, better, and continuous business value at scale. This includes eliminating multiple vendor management, not burning through much-needed resources for infra maintenance, minimizing purchase costs, and breaking down organizational silos to enable delivering more innovative mobile applications at accelerated speed.
Interested in knowing more?
Pilot the Flare Bazel services today, or be the first to know more on future product releases as we integrate Flare+Bitrise.
Bitrise was proud to offer the world’s first virtualized M1 CI/CD environment, and is the first in bringing CI together with powerful advanced features like build & test analytics and shared remote cache for Bazel and non-Bazel users alike. As a Mobile DevOps platform, our focus is to continuously improve effective, and frequent deployment of mobile apps, in addition to users having everything Mobile DevOps in one place.
Enjoy faster builds, starting today.
