CI Build 18m36s -> 5m47s

I don't know whether to be proud about this or feel embarrassed about this lol.

I inherited a CI build setup that has had ~18m assembles for 3+ years now. More experienced and more senior developers had chosen the agents used for our CI builds, and I never questioned that they might not be ideal.

However recently, I saw a message in slack from Pablo Baxter about how the i7i agent had improved his builds somewhat, and how it is probably because the SSDs on that agent were superior to other comparable agents, so I decided to give it a try. After all his builds had improved a few minutes and that sounded great to me.

The day of the experiment came and I was in shock that the build was 13 minutes faster. Pablo said he was happy for me, but I was still unnerved that it was too much of a difference for what he was describing.

After much research, I realized that our current agents did NOT have local SSDs. In fact they were completely reliant on network attached storage, which made the millions of reads and writes excruciatingly slow 🤦.

We ended up going with the c6id.8xlarge because it was cheaper than the i7i, but I argued for the i7i because engineer time costs more than a slight increase of cost for compute time.

So much to say on this topic, but that's the gist of it.

I don't think I will ever improve builds to this degree in my career again haha.