Two years ago the RabbitMQ team at VMware was facing a challenge. Our CI pipeline could not keep up the rate of commits, and after we consolidated about 30 of our repositories into a monorepo, things only got worse. A single commit would take 2-3 hours to flow through the primary test suites, not including delays from flakes. We considered many options, but most of them felt like reinventing the wheel. Bazel seemed like a good solution, but a risky investment. Erlang and Elixir didn’t appear to be supported languages at the time, and the usability reputation for bazel was mixed. Nevertheless, 2-3 hours waiting for a commit leaves some time to experiment. This lead to the creation of `rules_erlang`, and with combination of Bazel and BuildBuddy, the time to green for a given commit dropped dramatically, something typically around 15 minutes. We would like to share some of the highs and lows of this journey with the Bazel community.
Speaker: Rin Kuryloski
