DEVOPSdigest

Bitrise announced the acquisition of Flare.Build.

Flare Build Systems provides the backend services needed to realize the full potential of the Bazel build system. Bitrise will integrate Flare’s product suite and expertise into its Mobile DevOps Ecosystem, continuing Flare’s work to increase developer productivity at enterprises and startups alike. This acquisition is part of Bitrise’s larger mission to equip mobile product organizations with the tools to manage and automate mobile operations and core workflows, all from a single platform.

While Bazel has seen widespread adoption among mobile-first technology companies including Pinterest, LinkedIn, Lyft, Uber, Slack, Tinder and Reddit, it is time and resource intensive to adopt, and challenging to scale. Even after a successful migration to Bazel—a process that can take an entire dedicated team up to a year to accomplish—there’s still much work to be done on building and operationalizing the backend services necessary to power Bazel’s key features. Building these services, which include shared build cache and distributed builds, is daunting for smaller development teams and often not cost effective even for large enterprises.

Bitrise is solving this multi-million dollar problem for businesses by tying together each of the individual components necessary to deliver on the promise of Bazel in one integrated solution. In adding this solution to Bitrise’s existing Mobile DevOps platform, development teams of all sizes, across various industries, can now reap the benefits of Bazel quickly and effectively, whether they have used the tools before or not. The simplified process also improves developer experience (DevX), boosts engineering productivity, and increases ROI.

With the integration of Flare.Build, Bitrise is now also providing benefits for mobile teams through other build tools, such as Gradle, Tuist, and Xcode, even without Bazel. By adapting Flare.Build’s advanced caching and CDN technology to these other tools, Bitrise users will have the ability to speed up feedback loops, iterate faster, and multiply their app build performance by up to 10x.

“Flare.Build’s technology, alongside our existing solutions, puts us one step closer to giving mobile product organizations everything they need to expand their mobile app capabilities from one platform, and positively influence the impact that apps have on their organizations,” said Barnabás Birmacher, CEO of Bitrise. “With this new expertise, we are providing access to the performance gains that Bazel users expect without the drastic cost usually associated with the powerful but complex tool.”

Bitrise is now eight years into building a mobile ecosystem that closes the chasm between the world’s growing demand for mobile products and the ability of today’s mobile organizations to deliver on that demand. In addition to the acquisition of Flare.Build, Bitrise has been furthering this mission by releasing other solutions to help development teams overcome barriers in the build process. For example, Bitrise recently built and released a virtualized Apple silicon CI/CD environment to help development teams transition to M1 as Intel is phased out. The company also introduced Build Pipelines, a solution that allows developers to organize the entire CI/CD process, and multiple other products designed to address the challenges that uniquely plague mobile teams.

“Faster build and test pipelines enable both higher quality and more frequent releases, allowing mobile companies to iterate quickly and deliver a better product to end-users,” said Zach Gray, Founder of Flare.Build. “Bazel has made a major impact in this area for Google and other industry leaders, but has remained out of reach for the majority of engineering teams. It is clear that the wider mobile industry is ready for a true Bazel-native CI platform that combines scalable macOS compute infrastructure, CI pipelines, build insights and distributed builds all into one cohesive integrated solution. We are thrilled to be working on this as part of Bitrise."

With each new addition to its ecosystem, Bitrise enables companies, ranging from visionary SMBs to established enterprises, to elevate their mobile product proficiencies and capabilities to compete in the mobile space.