> I don't know that making a new volume from a snap should fundamentally be faster than what a P4 sync could do. You're still paying for a full copy.
My experience with running a c++ build farm in the cloud is that in theory all of this is true but in practice it costs an absolute fortune, and is painfully slow. At the end of the day it doesn’t matter if you’ve provisioned io1 storage; you’re still pulling it across something that vaguely resembles a SAN, and that most of the operations that AWS perform are not as quick as you think they are. It took about 6 minutes to boot a windows ec2 instance, for example. Our incremental build was actually quicker than that, so we spent more time waiting for the instance to start up and attach to our volume cache than we did actually running CI. The cost of the machines was expensive that we couldn’t justify keeping them running all day.
> You could have possibly had existing volumes with mostly up to date workspaces.
This is what we did for incremental builds. The problem was when you want an extra instance that volume needs to be created. We also saw roughly a 5x difference in speed (IIRC, this was 2021 when I set this up) between a noop build on a mounted volume and a noop build that we had just performed the build on.
My experience with running a c++ build farm in the cloud is that in theory all of this is true but in practice it costs an absolute fortune, and is painfully slow. At the end of the day it doesn’t matter if you’ve provisioned io1 storage; you’re still pulling it across something that vaguely resembles a SAN, and that most of the operations that AWS perform are not as quick as you think they are. It took about 6 minutes to boot a windows ec2 instance, for example. Our incremental build was actually quicker than that, so we spent more time waiting for the instance to start up and attach to our volume cache than we did actually running CI. The cost of the machines was expensive that we couldn’t justify keeping them running all day.
> You could have possibly had existing volumes with mostly up to date workspaces.
This is what we did for incremental builds. The problem was when you want an extra instance that volume needs to be created. We also saw roughly a 5x difference in speed (IIRC, this was 2021 when I set this up) between a noop build on a mounted volume and a noop build that we had just performed the build on.