The Impact of Locality on CI/CD Workloads and Performance Trade-offs

Tim (Essence VC) and Ian (Keycard) sat down with Aditya, CEO of Blacksmith, to explore the inception and innovative approach of Blacksmith in the CI/CD space. Blacksmith utilizes gaming CPUs and NVMe SSDs to deliver high-performance, serverless CI compute. They discussed the challenges faced by large companies with CI systems, why GitHub Actions was chosen as their primary CI system, and how AI-induced code generation is pushing the need for faster and more efficient CI solutions. Adya also highlighted the future potential of CI observability and other improvements Blacksmith is focusing on to maintain their edge in the market.00:29 Founding Blacksmith: The Origin Story01:16 Understanding Blacksmith's Serverless CI Compute02:21 Challenges in CI/CD and Blacksmith's Solutions05:14 Technical Deep Dive: Performance and Optimization06:53 Why GitHub Actions?08:08 Innovative Hardware Choices for CI10:06 Scaling and Managing CI Workloads19:14 Future of CI/CD and AI Integration28:02 Spicy Futures: Predictions and Hot Takes