Here's a recap of everything that happened at RWX in July.
Big Features and Changes
In case you missed it, we renamed Mint to RWX. There are still a few lingering references to Mint which we'll be cleaning up soon.
We shipped some big features. You can now run on ARM, which speeds up building container images for ARM by about 10x.
We published a VS Code Extension, pushing feedback even earlier in the development process, straight into the editor. With autocompletion and inline documentation, the fastest feedback loop for defining CI/CD pipelines is now even faster.
We also added an option to start runs manually for engineering teams who want CI to be opt-in rather than running automatically.
Smaller Features
We published an API endpoint for setting vault secrets, which is especially helpful for automating credential rotation.
You can now view file trees for task filesystem outputs. It's super fast because we implemented it in WebAssembly.
We also added an option to batch download logs for task groups. We build the tar archive on the fly, so downloads start right away.
We published a package to create GitHub Pull Requests.
Within a run, tasks with the same cache key will only execute once.
Evolving CI/CD
CI/CD hasn't changed much in the past ten years, until now.
RWX is the only CI/CD platform with automatic caching, and sandboxing is the key to caching without false positives.
GitHub Actions requires cancelling a run to retry a single job, but with RWX you can retry failures while a run is in progress.
We also added support for multiple operating systems in a way that has an explicit configuration but avoids typing boilerplate.
Speaking of the base operating system, we mostly run a vanilla Ubuntu image, which is much better than the GitHub Actions 47 GB base image behemoth.
News, Opinions, and Best Practices
When a Node.js maintainer lost their keys, RWX runs were unaffected.
Pinning to precise versions of runtimes matters. Sometimes minor versions introduce bugs, like when Node 22.7 broke character encoding.
That's why we use an RWX cron to track the VS Code Node.js version.
Company Updates
Dave Reed joined RWX as Chief Operating Officer.
Coming Up
We published a proposal for a new way to build container images. We'll be rolling this out in a beta. If you want substantially faster image builds, reach out to [email protected]
Related posts
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