OpenMeter reposted this
We made our CI pipeline 5X faster (25 to 5 minutes) with Dagger and Depot. As the OpenMeter codebase grew in complexity, our build time became unbearably slow. This was a big deal as we had just grown our engineering team, and we didn't want to waste valuable developer time. To make it even worse, our GitHub Actions bill became one of our most significant SaaS spend. To end this pain in August, I put fast CI on our roadmap with an ambitious 7 minutes target; see the exact copy from our planning below: > Fast CI > Why: Slow CI jobs are burning us in multiple ways: > 1. Expensive developer time > 2. Risk of slow MTTR in case of hotfix > 3. Expensive GitHub Actions > What: Reduce CI time to under 7 minutes. Reduce CI cost. Honestly, 7 minutes was mostly made up; I felt from my previous experience that it would be a healthy build-time. I was pleasantly surprised when Márk picked up the task and returned with a 5-minute build time (5x improvement) for half the cost in 2 days. This was possible by leveraging Dagger Cache and Depot in our CI builds. (Fun fact: Depot was in the same YC W23 batch as OpenMeter.) If you are interested in how Mark improved our built time 5x, check out the blog post in the comment. It includes some excellent benchmarks comparing Depot and GitHub runners in cost and speed.