Accelerate CI with CloudBees CI Workspace Caching

Speeding up the software delivery process is vital for reaching customers quickly and gaining a competitive edge. However, identifying bottlenecks in this process can be challenging. Let's start by examining the build and test phases. For instance, when a CI job takes longer to execute, it delays the feedback loop for developers, potentially leading to release delays and increased costs associated with running ephemeral agents. If you're a user of Jenkins® or CloudBees Continuous Integration (CloudBees CI), we have a solution to help expedite your CI process and optimize efficiency. Enter workspace caching, a new feature from CloudBees CI designed to speed up your CI jobs by reusing cached artifacts from previous builds. This feature can shave minutes or even hours off build times, optimizing your CI/CD pipeline significantly.

With the rise of containerization in continuous integration, ephemeral build environments have become the norm. While this provides flexibility and isolation, it also means that dependencies and other files must be downloaded for each new build. CloudBees CI workspace caching feature reuses cached artifacts from previous builds to speed up CI jobs. For example, if a project uses many dependencies (Maven, gradle, npm, or any other build tools as the feature is completely agnostic), the cache will store it after the first build and reuse it for subsequent builds. This cache reuse eliminates the need to re-download them for each run and can accelerate your CI jobs. 

Workspace caching also offers flexibility in cache usage. Builds can rely on cached data from the main branch, previous builds of the same branch, or a combination of both. This flexibility allows for optimization based on the specific needs of a project, speeding up CI at an organization-wide level.

This feature benefits both developers and enterprise-level clients who experience slow builds. By reducing the time it takes to build the workspace from scratch for every build, workspace caching reduces feedback loop times, avoids potential release delays, and decreases costs associated with running ephemeral agents longer than necessary.

CloudBees CI continues to release features to optimize the CI space, and workspace caching is a great addition. If slow build times due to large dependencies have been a challenge for you, CloudBees CI workspace caching may be the answer you've been looking for. The workspace caching plugin is included in the CloudBees Assurance Program (CAP), and with direct support from CloudBees, customers can look forward to faster build times and accelerated development cycles for more efficient CI pipelines. 

• Overview Page

• See this in action here

• Read up on this feature in the documentation