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From the post: > Earthly gives you write once, run anywhere build consistency, making it super easy to reproduce CI failures on your local computer.

marcinzm 3y ago
That doesn't help with non-deterministic failures and I've also yet to see a true "write once, run anywhere" system ever. It may be 99% "write once, run anywhere" but there's always that 1% edge case.
- bastardoperator 3y ago
  Exactly. This just reminds me of "works on my computer". Building locally is more advantageous for developing CI workflow, but I want to be as close to prod as possible and doing that on snowflake developer workstations is an exercise in futility.
  - oftenwrong 3y ago
    Earthly makes use of BuildKit, which essentially executes the build steps in containers. It provides more isolation from the CI runner / dev workstation. Instead of having developers manage their own build tools, Earthly makes it easy to have the build definition manage them.
    - vlovich123 3y ago
      All flakiness I’ve observed in code I’ve written has been dominated by things like “this job isn’t getting enough cpu cycles and the test assertion is too aggressive in such a scenario” or “lack of CPU cycles is triggering a race condition” or “statistical test X isn’t written robustly”. Not sure how containers solve these problems. My point being that this tool solves some problems for some teams and maybe for a lot of teams that struggle with this problem, but hard problems remain and this isn’t a silver bullet for that. You can’t outsource stability of the project-specific test infrastructure which is where most of the cost lies these days I think.
- otabdeveloper4 3y ago
  Nix solves all these problems for good. It's a monster of a system, but if you're migrating anyways then might as well migrate to the real deal, not to some fly-by-night half-baked thing that gets you halfway there.

marcinzm 3y ago

That doesn't help with non-deterministic failures and I've also yet to see a true "write once, run anywhere" system ever. It may be 99% "write once, run anywhere" but there's always that 1% edge case.

bastardoperator 3y ago
Exactly. This just reminds me of "works on my computer". Building locally is more advantageous for developing CI workflow, but I want to be as close to prod as possible and doing that on snowflake developer workstations is an exercise in futility.
- oftenwrong 3y ago
  Earthly makes use of BuildKit, which essentially executes the build steps in containers. It provides more isolation from the CI runner / dev workstation. Instead of having developers manage their own build tools, Earthly makes it easy to have the build definition manage them.
  - vlovich123 3y ago
    All flakiness I’ve observed in code I’ve written has been dominated by things like “this job isn’t getting enough cpu cycles and the test assertion is too aggressive in such a scenario” or “lack of CPU cycles is triggering a race condition” or “statistical test X isn’t written robustly”. Not sure how containers solve these problems. My point being that this tool solves some problems for some teams and maybe for a lot of teams that struggle with this problem, but hard problems remain and this isn’t a silver bullet for that. You can’t outsource stability of the project-specific test infrastructure which is where most of the cost lies these days I think.
otabdeveloper4 3y ago
Nix solves all these problems for good. It's a monster of a system, but if you're migrating anyways then might as well migrate to the real deal, not to some fly-by-night half-baked thing that gets you halfway there.