Reflection on the usage of bazel

- 3 minutes read - 466 words

TLDR:

Bazel is definitely worth to use on your projects even though it has minimum supports of some languages such as C#.

Prologue

Before I was interested in bazel, I always thought why bother to learn a new building system even I knew that kubernetes once was built with bazel. 4 months ago, I was involved in a micro service structured project. I was dissatisfied with dev workflow using skaffold and I looked other options in the market. Then I found tilt. Maybe the usage of tilt in kubernetes Cluster API project weight in my choice to tilt when I found that tilt is used in dev workflow in kubernetes cluster API project.

Begin to use Tilt

Tilt has following features. The good parts I liked most are docker-compose and Starlark supports beside kubernetes. You can write Starlark scripts to your workflow and it will make life easier. My initial local dev environment is based on docker-compose and Tilt seems is the perfect fit. I spent 2 days set up my tilt environment. The impression of tilt is a wow moment. I never thought that container based development can’t be this way. This experiences made me thought that it maybe is about time to dig deeper to learn Starlark and bazel.

  • Very Holistic

  • Orderly Orchestration

  • Magic UI

  • live_update

  • Code in Flow

  • Faster Workflow

  • Snapshots

  • Built-In Best Practices

  • Painless Onboarding

  • Quantified Dev Experie

Begin to use Starlark and bazel

Starlark is a dialect of Python. I used python for my data processing, data mining and machine learning projects, I quickly picked up the language and started to use startlark to practice bazel.

Starlark (formerly known as Skylark) is a language intended for use as a configuration language. It was designed for the Bazel build system.

I used bazel on following projects and learned a thing or two.

Cost and benefit analysis

Costs

  • Cost: 1-2 man-day. Maybe cost more depending on the size of projects.

Benefits

  • Time saving: 40% decrease on the build time the total benefits will be multiplied with the number of your engineers and the lifetime of the projects. The time saving is substantial.

  • Cost of building machines: Reduce the usage time of machines. It can be translated to reduce costs if those building machines are on-demard cloud resources.

  • Morale: Fast feedback loop makes engineers happy. In turn they are in good mode.

  • Productivity: Fast feedback loop, make engineers most times in the flow state and get more things done.

  • Confidency with test coverage.

Epilogue: Is it Worth it All?

I will say it worth it considering the experience I using bazel, the cost and benefits. You can find the same conclusion here from grab

comments powered by Disqus