Kind of interesting to think that CI is significantly slower in practice and both systems need to be maintained. Is it just the overhead of pushing through git or are there other reasons as well?
The way we do things is that we build everything in the cloud and store in a central container registry. So if I trigger a build during dev, the CI runner can re-use that, e.g. if it’s needed before running a test or creating a preview env.
Similarly if another dev (or a CI runner) triggers a build of one of our services, I won’t have to next time I start my dev environment. And because it’s built in the cloud there’s no “works on my machine”.
Same applies to tests actually. They run in the cloud in an independent and trusted environment and the results are cached and stored centrally.
Garden knows all the files and config that belong to a given test suite. So the very first CI run may run tests for service A, service B, and service C. I then write code that only changes service B, open a PR and only the relevant tests get run in CI.
And because it’s all in prod-like environments, I can run integ and e2e tests from my laptop as I code, instead of only having that set up for CI.
You would need a very perfect and flexible CI system in place that wouldn't need to rebuild anything it doesn't need and only run the tests you want or only recently failed tests etc.
Many CI systems would spin up a new box instead of using persistent so likely have to rebuild if no cache, etc.
So basically I would say most of the overhead is in not having a persistent box with knowledge of last build or ability to choose what to run in there, which pretty much just equals to local capabilities.
Often you also have the CI system designed in a way to verify a “from scratch” build that avoids any issues with “works on my machine” scenarios due to things still being cached that shouldn’t be there anymore.
I tried Garden briefly but didn't like it for some reason. DevSpace was simpler to set up and works quite reliably. The sync feature where they automatically inject something into the pod works really well.
DevSpace is a great tool but it’s bummer you didn’t like Garden.
Admittedly, documentation and stability weren’t quite what we’d like and we’ve done a massive overhaul of the foundational pieces in the past 12 months.
If you want to share feedback I’m all ears, my email is in my profile.
Your pipelines should mostly be CI provider agnostic and runnable from anywhere, including your laptop during development.
If you ever need to change a CI provider, you just move your pipelines.
I'm definitely biased, I'm working at Garden[0] which allows you to do just that but it's mostly applicable for teams using Kubernetes. I paused at your comment because Garden has sometimes been called "a makefile for the cloud".
Whatever tooling you use, having portable pipelines that you can iterate on and debug from your laptop is the only sane approach imo.
To add to what's already been said: If you think about it, CI pipelines are typically a complete description of how your system is built, tested, and deployed.
Which is pretty fantastic except for how walled off they are. You can't really re-use these descriptions for e.g. development, they're not vendor agnostic, and they only way to run them is by pushing your code.
Maybe it's a silly analogy but it's almost like being a web dev that doesn't have a browser and needs to send their code to a friend who can tell them if that font size looks good.
I think we're way over due for freeing these "blueprints" of our system from the confines of CI and making them portable and flexible. And containers are the technology that's enabling that.
Full disclaimer (as always): I work at Garden[0] where we're also solving that problem but taking a slightly different approach to Dagger (it's still a DAG). Garden config is declarative and the jobs (we call them actions) have a semantic meaning. You can e.g. have a Build action of type container or a Deploy action of type Helm and Garden will figure out what to do with it.
We've also put a lot of emphasis on the inner loop development story with hot reloading functionality, log streaming and more.
We did indeed have a reputation for being a bit more complicated then some of the other tools out there (and in turn more flexible). But we've put enormous effort into simplifying Garden itself and also improving documentation.
If you already have your stack containerised you should be good to go but experience with Kubernetes is definitely a plus. Most of our users use K8s in production and use Garden for developing and testing in production-like environments in "inner loop" dev and CI.
Just to add to what Tao was saying, our pipelines are not only portable but also "smart".
Instead of having to specify every step of a job—either in code or config—you instead tell Garden that it's e.g. a build of type container, or a deploy of type Helm, and our plugin system figures out the rest (of course with escape hatches when needed).
We also track the files that go "into" each job and cache the results, so the same job never has to run twice if the code doesn't change. So if you have a large distributed system and a change only affects a small part of it, you don't need to re-run everything. It can save _a lot_ of time.
Unrelated, but love that the Cicada team created a Treesitter grammar for Neovim!
Me too. In fact Garden (dev tooling for the Kubernetes)[0] is a Berlin start-up with three Icelandic founders.
And if I'm not mistaken, two of us worked briefly with @halldorel (commented below) at an earlier Icelandic start-up. It's a small world (if you're Icelandic).
Edit: Scratch that, three Gardeners worked with @halldorel.
We use Mutagen for Garden's hot reloading mechanism. (Garden is a dev tool for K8s and hot reloading enables users to sync changes directly to a prod like dev environment as opposed to doing a rebuild and re-deploy).
It really is a fantastic piece of technology and completely transformed the whole experience (we were using good 'ol rsync before). In particular it works seamlessly across platforms.
This is a MASSIVE endorsement as far as I am concerned
I used Garden in the rsync days and it was already pretty good. The code behind Garden is some of the best TypeScript + Node I've ever seen, so if this was better and more performant than what you already had I'm sold.
It's zero effort which is important for a small team like ours. Allows us to focus on the content as opposed to bikeshedding design.
Overall I'm happy with the look and feel of things and the support is typically good.
That being said, they recently shipped changes that essentially made the docs site impossibly slow for a few days. They've been working on fixing that and it's better, but not as snappy as before. I also preferred the previous look (it's very similar but the new one is a bit more clunky imo).
We do have a lot of long code examples (YAML reference docs) which I think may contribute to the "sluggishness".
But overall I'd recommend if you want to minimise effort and maintenance. In any case it's easy to give it a spin and see if it works for you.
Our mission is to keep developers productive and happy in the cloud-native era.
Docker, Kubernetes and other cloud-native technologies have made us better than ever at operating our systems in production, but the day-to-day development experience has been left lagging behind.
Developers spend less time in flow, and more time waiting for builds, debugging scripts, or otherwise fighting their tools. We're here to fix that.
Our platform—which includes our open source core product[2]—allows developers to work on distributed systems with remote, production-like dev environments, while enjoying the same fast and frictionless feedback loops we've come to expect when developing a single service locally.
It's a platform that democratizes the kind of advanced developer tooling that only the largest software companies have the resources to build and maintain.
We're still a small team and you'd be joining at a time where you can have a huge impact on our product and our culture. If you've ever thought to yourself that something's not right with our modern development workflows, now's your chance to help fix it!
Garden[1] is a tool we built (yes, I'm affiliated :)) that has a lot of this functionality built-in. Might fit your use case.
We recently re-wrote the hot reload functionality to use Mutagen[2] under the hood and it's insanely fast (<200ms anecdotally). It also does two way sync which can be useful. The old implementation used rsync but a lot of our Windows users struggled with that. So I figured I'd share in case that sounds familiar.
What happens after a sync event depends on the stack, but we've had pretty good success with Entr[3]. We often have it watch a single file so that multiple watchers in a shared dev cluster don't eat up all the node's resources.
I have no experience with the platform myself, just bumped into it by coincidence when my OSS project (written it Typescript) was featured