Why I joined Blacksmith to work on storage again
Blog post from Blacksmith
Blacksmith’s CI platform treats storage as a central systems challenge because it creates and destroys roughly 2.5 million ephemeral per-job volumes daily, with peaks near 1,000 new microVMs per minute, generating about two petabytes of writes per day that are mostly discarded. Each short-lived job must quickly boot from shared images, fetch repositories and dependencies, rebuild environments, run I/O-intensive tests, preserve useful caches across VM lifetimes, and durably retain artifacts such as logs and build outputs. The workload combines extreme churn, high concurrent access to shared data, competing cache updates, strict in-run reliability, and differing durability requirements, since most data can disappear after a run while artifacts must remain available long term. Conventional block devices, local tool caches, and object stores address pieces of the problem but do not inherently provide CI-specific capabilities such as lazy data access, incremental updates, cache consistency, policy-aware eviction, locality, and protection against corrupted shared state. The author argues that pooling many customers’ bursty workloads can improve infrastructure utilization and identifies open systems problems around fast data delivery, deduplicated warm environments, online classification of write durability, artifact persistence, and safe sharing, describing these challenges as the reason for joining Blacksmith’s storage and systems engineering effort.
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