Serverless cloud infra for CI
Blacksmith helps companies run their continuous integration (CI) up to twice as fast, at half the cost. We do this by running their CI on high performance gaming CPUs. - Engineering productivity is often marred by slow CI that grows quadratically with the size of the engineering organization. - On top of this, companies pay high markups to run CI on the hyperscalers. - Consequently, companies have to run their CI on spot instances to keep costs in check. Since spot instances can get pre-empted at any point, running CI reliably on them requires [significant engineering investment](https://www.rippling.com/blog/how-rippling-used-spot-instances-to-save-and-scale-ci-cd). Blacksmith offers CI compute that is more performant, cheaper, and reliable. With Blacksmith, companies do not have to think about CI as they scale. We are starting with GitHub Actions - today's most popular and fastest-growing CI system. With a one-line change, companies can run their CI up to twice as fast on our high-performance hardware. In addition to this, Blacksmith provides colocated warm caches along with optimizations for common CI workloads (like building and pushing Docker images). Aayush, JP and Aditya have gained deep systems and product knowledge from their time at Cockroach Labs and Faire respectively. Both these companies, with several hundred engineers, were spending in the order of millions of dollars on their CI. Yet they were riddled with slow CI and actively seeking out cheaper and faster alternatives. Blacksmith offers exactly this alternative, at a time where being lean is table-stakes for most companies.
Active Founders
Aditya Jayaprakash
Co-founder and CEO of Blacksmith. Aditya was previously an engineer at Faire (YC W17) where he worked on search infra and ads. As a founding member of the ads team, he led retrieval and targeting and helped grow ads from 0 -> $X M. Aditya graduated from the University of Waterloo with a degree in Computer Science and a Master's degree from the University of Alberta, where he did research in Theoretical Computer Science.
Aditya Maru
Aditya Maru is the co-founder & co-CTO of Blacksmith. Before starting Blacksmith, Aditya worked at Cockroach Labs. At Cockroach he was a senior engineer on a core database team responsible for implementing disaster recovery solutions. This was where he gained his deep systems knowledge. Aditya graduated from the University of Waterloo with a degree in Computer Science.
Aayush Shah
Aayush is a cofounder and co-CTO of Blacksmith. Prior to this, Aayush was a software engineer at Superblocks, and worked as a systems engineer on the replication team at CockroachDB before that. Aayush was awarded the Spartan Award at Cockroach Labs for being critical in bringing home the biggest deal in the company's history. Aayush graduated from the University of Waterloo with a degree in Computer Science, which is where he met his co-founders.
Company Launches
tl;dr
Blacksmith helps companies run their GitHub Actions up to twice as fast, at half the cost. We do this by running their Github Actions on high-performance gaming CPUs on a software stack optimized for CI.
What problem are we solving?
More engineers writing more tests over time leads to quadratic growth of a company’s CI run time. On top of this, platforms like GitHub Actions have staggering markups while providing compute backed by decade-old server hardware. These platforms are disincentivized from investing in software optimizations to make CI faster since they bill by the minute.
How is Blacksmith 2x faster?
Blacksmith runs GitHub Actions on high-performance gaming CPUs. These machines offer significantly better single-core performance, ideal for tasks like code compilation, testing, and single-threaded runtimes like Node.js.
The hardware is only part of the puzzle. Blacksmith runs a software stack optimized for CI.
- We colocate warm caches with our GitHub Action runners resulting in 4x faster cache reads and writes
- Local NVMe-backed filesystem for highly performant disk reads and writes
- Docker layers caching across all builds in a GitHub repository resulting in faster docker builds (coming soon)
- Shared volumes to turn every CI run into an incremental build (coming soon)
The numbers speak for themselves
Here’s Blacksmith being used in a public repo by one of our customers, Axelar.
How would I switch from Github to Blacksmith?
All you need to do is install our GitHub app and change one line of code in your workflow file.
Our vision
We want to be the compute layer for CI (think AWS EC2 for CI). Although we are starting with GitHub Actions, in the future, we plan on expanding to other CI platforms such as BuildKite, GitLab, Jenkins, etc.
We are going after the $10B CI compute market currently captured by the hyperscalers (AWS, GCP, Azure).
Our team
We are a team of three engineers who met at the University of Waterloo eight years ago. Aayush Shah and Aditya Maru were early engineers on CockroachDB, working on replication and disaster recovery, respectively. Aayush was then an early engineer at Superblocks, working on enterprise readiness. Aditya Jayaprakash (JP) did research in theoretical computer science and later joined Faire (YC W17), where he worked on search infra and was a founding member of the ads team.
If you’re using GitHub Actions, we can help your team move a lot faster while reducing spend. Try us out - we are a one-line change to integrate, no credit card required.
We love talking to companies about their CI infra. You can reach us at hello@blacksmith.sh.