What does HackerNews think of bazel-buildfarm?

It can be. By default it is local.

But it has protobufs interfaces (IIRC), so a distributed build farm would generate the grpc endpoints for their implementation and then you tell bazel on the command line (or via .bazelrc) the address of the build farm it can use.

There's a couple of projects that implement the distributed/grpc part, the main one is https://github.com/bazelbuild/bazel-buildfarm

A lot of the work is only because of the large size of the codebase. E.g. Forge and ObjFS, which is necessary because compiling the really large binaries on a normal workstation would OOM it. Or take days. https://bazel.build/basics/distributed-builds

If your codebase is "normal-sized," you don't need nearly that amount of infrastructure. There is probably some growing pain when transitioning from normal-sized to "huge," but that's part of the growing pain for any startup. You're going to have to hire people to work on internal tooling anyway; setting up a distributed build and testing service (especially now there are so many open-source and hosted implementations) is worth the effort once you're starting to scale. You're going to have to set that up regardless of a mono-repo or many separate repos.

It's probably only worth hiring serious, dedicated teams that work on building like Google once your CI costs are a significant portion of operation. That probably won't happen for a while for most startups.

https://github.com/bazelbuild/bazel-buildfarm

https://cloud.google.com/build

https://aws.amazon.com/codebuild/

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/products/devops/pipelines/

Engflow has some very smart people.

There are also a number of other open source alternatives such as Buildbarn (https://github.com/buildbarn) and Buildfarm (https://github.com/bazelbuild/bazel-buildfarm) which you can host yourself.

Personally, I've found Buildbarn great to throw up in Kubernetes and build massive projects with.

Bazel's buildfarm remote execution service is growing: https://github.com/bazelbuild/bazel-buildfarm