Buildalon

👋 Ahoy, Product Hunt! 🚀 Your local builds are fast, but they don’t scale. Your cloud builds scale, but they’re so slow you’re stuck waiting for two hours to get your PR approved. Many developers face this dilemma when using github actions. If only you could have local build speed with the scalability of the cloud. Introducing Buildalon Action Runners. These are fully cached GitHub Action Runners that can drop your incremental build times by over 50% while being fully managed and scalable. This is the ideal solution for large projects like desktop apps, mobile apps, games, and more. To get started with Buildalon, just install the GitHub app and change the runs-on labels in your GitHub workflow. That’s it. Jobs will be automatically distributed to your Buildalon runners, which come preinstalled with the same software as standard GitHub Action Runners. When a job is done, any installed software and built artifacts remain on the runner, like they would be on your local machine. The next job can reuse those artifacts to significantly speed up the incremental build time. This preserves the speed boost of local builds and the benefits of cloud compute, which can easily be scaled up or down, parallelized, or reset to a clean state. Together these qualities make Buildalon cost effective and much easier to set up than a custom solution. 🗺️ How we got here 🧭 At Virtual Maker we use the Unity game engine to build games and AR/VR apps. This workflow is plagued with 2-4 hour build times which would really slow down our development. We built Buildalon to improve our PR flow by ensuring each change can be built and tested before going into the main branch. Now, we hope you can benefit from this system too! 📣 Feedback request ✍️ If you’re suffering from long builds, give our trial runners a shot and let us know if Buildalon reduces your build times. If you have any suggestions for the website or set up process, we’d love to hear that too. Have a wonderful day, Nicholas Perell Junior SWE @ Virtual Maker