Your best work happens when you have quick feedback loops and short CI build durations. However, with an increasing number of contributors and a growing code base, CI is a constant balance of reliability and speed.
Addressing the need for a more efficient developer experience was our primary focus when we first introduced Bitrise Build Cache last year. Today, we’re excited to roll out new updates that make the CI performance benefits of Bitrise Build Cache broadly available to everyone building a Gradle or Bazel application, regardless of your CI provider.
Now, Bitrise Build Cache not only serves as a native companion to Bitrise CI but it can also be integrated with your CI workflows on the most popular CI platforms. Today’s latest upgrades mean you can:
- Trial Bitrise Build Cache with your own projects – 30 days free, on us!
- Implement Bitrise Build Cache into your existing Bitrise CI workflows or workflows you’re already running with another CI provider.
- Deep dive into the performance of your build cache, including cache hit rate and build durations.
“Now, more than ever, we must meet developers where they already are. Our goal with Bitrise Build Cache is to help teams uncover hidden optimizations without forcing them to make sweeping changes to their current workflows.”
Daniel Balla
CSO & Co-founder, Bitrise
Cache builds with your existing CI platform
Switching to a new CI provider is non-trivial, especially for engineering teams already running sophisticated workflows spanning multiple applications. We recognized that for teams to find the most benefit in Bitrise Build Cache, it must be easily integrated with workflows running on any CI provider.
With today's release, we're putting the power in your hands. You can now access everything you need to integrate Bitrise Build Cache into your existing Bitrise workflows and those from other CI providers.
Our guided onboarding experience offers clear, step-by-step instructions to help you quickly and efficiently set up Bitrise Build Cache for your Gradle and Bazel projects, ensuring a smooth transition and enhanced performance.
Cut your build durations in half (or more)
Bitrise Build Cache reduces redundant work by storing outputs of intermediate build steps, like compiled code or test results, for reuse in subsequent builds. It's a game-changer for teams using Gradle or Bazel build systems. By reusing unchanged build and test outputs, you can massively reduce the amount of CI work that needs to be done, which not only slashes your build times but also protects your CI costs.
We recently benchmarked the impact of Bitrise Build Cache on the CircleCI build durations of open-source Gradle and Bazel applications. We discovered a 72% and 83% reduction in build durations, respectively. In the case of the benchmarked Gradle application, this meant reducing build durations from 29 minutes to 8 minutes.
Beginning today, we invite you to spin up a free 30-day trial of Bitrise Build Cache so that you can benchmark its impact on your own applications.
Monitor cache performance
A remote build cache proves its worth only when your CI builds can effectively utilize it. Considering Gradle and Bazel applications commonly create thousands of outputs for each build, having granular visibility into your cache hit rate is key to fine-tuning your build cache’s performance.
Today we released several updates to Bitrise Build Cache and Insights that deliver better visibility into historical cache performance and trends. These updates include detailed reporting on your total cache hit rate for the overall build and cache hit rates for specific build and test outputs. And, with Bitrise Insights, you can even set up alerts to proactively notify you when builds fail to meet your expected cache hit rates.
What’s next for Bitrise Build Cache
Looking ahead, our focus is on delivering additional features to provide you with deeper insights into the efficiency of your build cache. These enhancements will expose how well your cache is performing and identify potential areas for incremental optimization.
We are developing benchmarking tools to compare your build's performance with and without Bitrise Build Cache. Additionally, we plan to roll out tools designed to pinpoint which areas of your application require optimization to sustain the improved performance benchmarks. This includes providing detailed insights into the most time-consuming Gradle Tasks and Bazel Actions in your builds.
Thank you to our customers who helped us grow Bitrise Build Cache into the solution it is today, and if you’d like to share feedback on our roadmap, please join the conversation on Discuss.
Getting started
If you’re building an application with Gradle or Bazel and need to trim down your CI build durations, check out Bitrise Build Cache. You can get started on your own with a free 30-day trial, or drop us a note if you want to learn more.
