We built the fastest CI in the world. It failed. Here's what we learned

Earthly has decided to shut down its Earthly CI service to focus on its core strengths, emphasizing local builds and reproducibility with Earthly and Earthly Satellites. The company initially set out to revolutionize CI/CD tooling by creating a system that offered unparalleled build speed and consistency, but found limited market interest in its CI platform, likening it to the impracticality of flying cars. The strategy was to offer a distributed build system that would draw users with its unique speed advantage, but despite early enthusiasm from a niche user base, the broader market perceived Earthly CI as just another CI tool with migration challenges and limited differentiation. Earthly found more success with its Satellites product, which provides fast builds while allowing users to maintain their existing CI setups, thus mitigating the reluctance associated with switching CI systems. The company is now redirecting its resources towards enhancing Earthly and Earthly Satellites, which have shown more promising adoption rates, and will continue to support users through the transition from Earthly CI.

Use this post, company, and trend context to find content marketing opportunities, perform competitive analysis, or address product feature gaps via the Plushcap MCP server or the Plushcap API.