The Infra Pod Turning Gaming PCs to Serverless CI for AI! (Chat with Aditya from Blacksmith)
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Aug 25, 2025 Discover how Blacksmith is revolutionizing CI/CD by transforming gaming PCs into high-performance serverless compute resources. The team dives into the challenges faced by traditional CI systems, the advantages of using GitHub Actions, and the impact of AI on code generation. Aditya shares insights on optimizing CI workflows with innovative hardware choices and the future of observability in CI. Get ready for bold predictions and spicy takes on the evolving landscape of continuous integration!
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Persist Docker Layer Cache
- Persist Docker layer caches across CI runs instead of rebuilding them in fresh VMs to drastically speed image builds.
- Mount an organization-level cache (Ceph sticky disk) into runners to make Docker rebuilds near-instant.
Bare Metal Requires Cloud Primitives
- Using bare-metal and non-cloud providers forces you to recreate core services (object store, block storage, networking).
- Blacksmith runs minIO and Ceph clusters and invests in networking tuning to achieve its performance tradeoffs.
Region Matters For Some Jobs
- Geographic locality matters for some CI jobs like Docker pushes, but many unit tests can run anywhere.
- Blacksmith pins organizations to regions and offers regional choices to balance latency and performance.