Company
Date Published
Author
Gavin Johnson
Word count
1926
Language
English
Hacker News points
None

Summary

Earthly Satellites have transitioned from beta to general availability, offering remote build runners managed by Earthly that significantly enhance build speeds for continuous integration (CI) processes. These satellites use a local cache to expedite repeated builds, proving especially beneficial in sandboxed CI environments like GitHub Actions or GitLab, where they can improve build times by 2-20 times. The satellites enable efficient sharing of compute and cache among team members and support cross-architecture builds, such as x86 from Apple Silicon machines. They also capitalize on high-bandwidth internet access, facilitating rapid dependency downloads and deployments. In practice, users like Ses Goe from NOCD have experienced drastic reductions in build times, from 45 minutes down to 4-5 minutes, by using Earthly Satellites, highlighting their ease of use and the elimination of complex build optimizations previously necessary.