Skip to main contentA modular platform proven to accelerate development and delivery of value to your users.
Value proposition
Aspect Workflows provides significant value by accelerating builds and tests while reducing cloud compute costs. You can expect cached builds to take ≤ 1 minute, CI to run 2–3x faster, and costs to be 40–80% lower. We operate a co-managed model: the infrastructure resides in your account, but Aspect provides 24/7 support, proactive monitoring, and ongoing collaboration.
Free tier for OSS projects
Aspect hosts an instance of the Workflows infrastructure on our own cloud, and we provide the service free to selected open-source software projects, such as Buildbarn.
Deploy in your own cloud environment
You retain data sovereignty and control because your source code and resources remain under your governance, which facilitates audits and compliance.
- Economic alignment: Separating the service and infrastructure encourages efficiency and cost transparency.
- Operational clarity: Dedicated projects allow you to enforce policy and get granular cost attribution without affecting your other systems.
Aspect Workflows integrates with four major CI systems: Buildkite, CircleCI, GitHub Actions, and GitLab CI/CD.
- CI integration: Pipelines are generated dynamically, which enables customization and elastic resource allocation.
- Real-time code review: The Marvin bot posts build and test results directly on your pull requests (GitHub) and will soon support merge requests (GitLab).
- Buildkite annotations: The system displays failures with parsed results, links to logs, and local reproduction instructions.
Components
The platform consists of several core components:
- Elastic CI runners: This scalable agent pool maintains incrementality even when new instances are created.
- Scalable remote cache: Right-size your build artifact cache to optimize build and test speed.
- Remote Build Execution: Scale a pool of worker machines to parallelize computation in case of wide cache misses.
- Observability and metrics: Our web UI provides insight into cache hit rate, test failure reasons, and platform performance.
- Quality tools: The platform includes formatting checks, linting tools, and BUILD file maintenance.
- Support and services: You get 24/7 Slack channel access, incident response, upgrades, performance tuning, and optional professional services.
Deployment architecture
Aspect Workflows is multi-cloud, supporting both AWS and GCP (with a main focus on GCP).
- Ownership and isolation: We recommend a dedicated project for you to maintain granular access and auditability.
- Security and policies: The system integrates with your corporate policies, vulnerability scanning, network restrictions, and key management.
- State management (IaC): We ensure Terraform state persistence with durability and access control (e.g., Cloud Storage).
Work orchestration
The platform orchestrates work through dynamic CI pipeline generation, giving you automatic or manual configuration options.
- System layers: We use a Terraform module (
workflows) and a Node.js application (rosetta) to abstract Bazel invocation via the Aspect CLI.
- Optimized Bazel execution: We tune the Bazel invocation for maximum speed by leveraging incrementality, caching, and distribution.
Expected results
- Typical benefits: You can typically achieve cached builds ≤ 1 minute, CI 2–3x faster, and 40–80% cost savings.
- KPIs: Define metrics like job duration, costs, productivity, and infrastructure usage before deployment to measure success.
- Post-deployment validation: Run test suites, evaluate performance, and adjust parameters as needed.
Your role
You should involve a point of contact with an infrastructure/DevOps background. This person will need to dedicate 4–8 hours during the deployment cycle. Deployment speed often depends on stakeholder availability and responsiveness.
Workload scope
The platform’s primary focus is on Bazel repositories. We deliver maximum optimization through deterministic execution, distributed cache, remote execution, and incrementality.
- Secondary workloads: Other build systems (Make, Maven, Gradle), scheduled tasks, and deployment automations can coexist but are outside the main optimization focus.
Ongoing support and next steps
We provide dedicated Slack channel, email support, and scheduled reviews for ongoing support and escalation.
Getting started Schedule a demo and start a free one-month trial; we manage the co-managed deployment in your cloud account.
Day-to-day adoption Your developers continue using their usual CI and code review flows, but now they get faster feedback and easier-to-understand failures.
Next steps
- To host your Open-Source project on our free tier, email us at hello@aspect.build with the URL of your project, and we’ll take a look to see if it’s suitable for hosting on our free tier.
