Blacksmith

About

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.

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