ReddRadar
What is Blacksmith?
Blacksmith offers a drop-in replacement for GitHub Actions runners that delivers significantly improved performance and cost efficiency. The platform runs GitHub Actions on bare metal gaming CPUs with high single-core performance, resulting in 2x faster hardware execution. It provides 4x faster cache downloads by co-locating cache artifacts in the same data center where jobs run, and enables 40x faster Docker builds through persistent Docker layers on NVMe drives.
The platform includes comprehensive observability features that fill gaps left by GitHub, allowing users to quickly identify issues in their CI pipelines. Users can spot failing and slow jobs, debug flaky tests and bugs through global search across CI logs, and fix failing tests on PRs with inline logs posted as GitHub comments. Blacksmith processes over 20 million jobs monthly and is trusted by more than 1,000 organizations worldwide.
Features
- Performance Optimization: Runs on bare metal gaming CPUs with highest single-core performance for 2x faster execution
- Cost Efficiency: Provides up to 67% total cost savings compared to GitHub's pricing with per-minute billing
- Observability Tools: Offers comprehensive monitoring and debugging capabilities for CI pipelines with global log search
- Cache Management: Co-locates cache artifacts in same data center for 4x faster downloads
- Docker Optimization: Persists Docker layers across CI runs on NVMe drives for 40x faster builds
Use Cases
- Accelerating CI/CD pipelines for software development teams
- Reducing GitHub Actions costs for startups and enterprises
- Debugging flaky tests and performance issues in CI workflows
- Improving Docker build performance in continuous integration
- Monitoring and optimizing CI pipeline performance across organizations
