Blacksmith launches: runs your GitHub Actions 2x faster, at half the cost

Blacksmith recently launched!

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<sup>"Serverless cloud infra for CI"

Blacksmith runs on cutting-edge gaming CPUs instead of decade-old server hardware. Get faster and cheaper builds with a one-line change. It's that easy.</sup>

Founded by Aditya Jayaprakash, Aditya Maru, and Aayush Shah

TLDR

‍Blacksmith helps companies run their GitHub Actions up to twice as fast, at half the cost. They do this by running their Github Actions on high-performance gaming CPUs on a software stack optimized for CI.
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What problem are they 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.
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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.

• They colocate warm caches with 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 ⤵️

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Here’s Blacksmith being used in a public repo by one of their customers, Axelar.
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How would I switch from Github to Blacksmith?

All you need to do is install their GitHub app and change one line of code in your workflow file.
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The vision

Blacksmith wants to be the compute layer for CI (think AWS EC2 for CI). Although they are starting with GitHub Actions, in the future, they plan on expanding to other CI platforms such as BuildKite, GitLab, Jenkins, etc.

They are going after the $10B CI compute market currently captured by the hyperscalers (AWS, GCP, Azure).

Learn More

_{🌐 Visit www.blacksmith.sh to learn more
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📅 Want to make your team move faster while reducing spend? Try them out!
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📧 Interested in talking about your CI Infra? Reach out!
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👥 Follow Blacksmith on LinkedIn, X and GitHub}