Remote builds for Open Source developers

by Yuvraaj Kelkar

Remote work is the new normal

Remote work is not a new concept, the COVID-19 pandemic just pushed this requirement front-and-center for ALL the developers and their employers.

Crave, our build acceleration tool, was designed to provide an access to the shared build and test infrastructure for the developers whether they work in-office or remotely. We realized Crave can be useful in the same way to Open Source developers as well, especially those who need beefy machines to build and test their code.

Giving back to the community

Configuring a beefy cloud instance for every project and then maintaining it is a chore. What if someone could just do all that and be simple to use? Then, maintaining it as the project grows is an overhead. What if someone just does all that and let the developers focus on their features? With this thought, Crave.io began its journey of the OSS project support.

The first project we supported was Apache Lucene/Solr. The feedback we received was quite encouraging and confirmed our hypothesis that Crave can indeed be useful to the OSS projects development. We then started adding more projects to our offering. As of this writing, we have 14 projects configured including Linux kernel, Kubernetes, Rustlang, and most recently MySQL and MariaDB. Notable in the projects we intend to support next include AOSP, AGL and Chromium.

All the build environments used for these projects are open source.

If you are a member of academia or an Open Source developer who would like your favorite Open Source project to be added to Crave, contact us.