Linaro Connect Bangkok

Modern CI/CD systems receive a wide variety of workloads, everything from quick jobs with simple dependencies that take less than a minute all the way up to full operating system rebuilds that can take hours or days. The needs of the software developer for quick turnaround of routine jobs are balanced against the system architect's expectation that expensive systems should not see undue amounts of idle time.

This analysis looks at the challenges faced by a CI/CD system that incorporates a variety of machines of varying capacities, hosted by different organizations, where the individual systems themselves have varying degrees of parallel compute capabilities. We identify several real-world systems - NixOS's "nixpkgs", the FreeBSD build system, the LLVM build farm, and others - to pick out some important considerations.

The Works on Arm cluster is run by Packet for Arm to provide test, development, and data center CI/CD resources for community projects to build on arm64. The project also includes a weekly video office hours, a weekly newsletter, and a channel on the Packet Community Slack and Freenode IRC (#worksonarm) for community discussion.

This BOF session will provide current and future users of the cluster an opportunity to discuss technical issues regarding integration, testing, Cloud Native and network workloads, and generally provide a forum for helping set the direction of the effort in the coming year.

The BOF leader, Ed Vielmetti, is director of the Works on Arm project.