Dimensional Data

Note: This post was co-authored with Incredibuild’s Director of Product Marketing, Yohai West. We are pleased to announce that Visual Studio version 17.6 Preview 3 includes Incredibuild’s most advanced developer acceleration platform: Incredibuild 10. This release includes several notable, new features that empower teams to speed up the development process: Patent-pending Build Cache technology allows developers to cache build outputs so that they can be reused by all team members. A smart and flexible enterprise license management mechanism, managed via a new web-based Coordinator user interface. Incredibuild Cloud optimization automatically manages the best mix of on-demand and spot resources, enabling organizations to use smaller and more affordable machines, while maintaining optimal performance and cost. In this post we’ll detail how these features can improve your daily development. Build Cache – cache what you can; distribute the rest Incredibuild 10’s most significant addition is its Build Cache technology. Incredibuild breaks down development processes into smaller tasks that can be executed independently, and Build Cache saves time and resources by reusing the cached outputs for previously executed tasks. Build Cache extends the incremental builds you are already likely familiar with by providing access to the outputs that your entire team has created. This means that an incremental build only has to build your changes and can rely on the cache when you have merged a teammate’s unrelated changes into yours. Additionally, temporarily working on a different branch won’t cause a large build when you switch back to your original branch. For any task outputs that are not in the cache, the Incredibuild Grid can distribute those tasks across its pool of compute cores. The Incredibuild Grid can allocate a pool of machines to meet the needed capacity for the tasks, including on-premises machines and static and on-demand spot instances provided by Incredibuild Cloud. The machines in the grid don’t need a compiler to be installed or the code to be present, as the Incredibuild Grid takes care of it all. Once those tasks are completed and cached using Build Cache, they never have to be executed again, dramatically reducing build times for your entire team. These features working in tandem means that you can cache what you can; distribute the rest. Build from home without impacting your speed Working from home affects build speeds due to limited upstream bandwidth. Build Cache lets you rely more on downstream bandwidth, giving you greater speed and better performance when starting new builds. With Build Cache you can reuse previous build data stored on your local machine to dramatically reduce build times without impacting your bandwidth. Deployment Examples Build Cache can be deployed in different ways depending on how your Clients connect to Endpoints. A single Client can function as its own Endpoint (local), multiple Clients can connect to a single Endpoint (shared), and more complex or dynamic deployments are possible as well. Local Uses the same Initiator Agents to host the Build Cache Endpoint and Build Cache Client. This means that each agent can only benefit from the cache of builds that were previously run on the same machine. This can be ideal if you are not sharing code with other developers, or if you are working from home with limited bandwidth. Shared Uses a single Agent to host the Build Cache Endpoint. Multiple Initiator […]