One of OpenMake Software’s product strategies is to keep things simple. Build management is one of the most complex operations in all of the IT world, and one of our key benefits is to simplify, organize and automate the build process for development, testing and production.

We’ve seen a trend among our customers to simplify their build management infrastructure by going to fewer build machines with more CPU cores. Builds in particular use relatively more CPU resources than other resources as code is interpreted and compiled in memory and then finally written to disk. By reducing the total number of machines, rack space, procurement, administration and other IT overhead costs are reduced at great cost savings per machine eliminated.

Recently, I was at one of the big chip makers where they used dual quad-core CPU Linux machines for their development and builds. They had two machines and were able to control access to allow separate areas for development, testing and release builds in keeping with best practices. Having all the horsepower of 8 CPU cores on a single machine kept them from needing more machines.

Another customer does 6000 builds per month with Meister on just two build machines.

IBM, when selling BuildForge, likes to talk about big build server farms, because their tool does remote execution on multiple machines, as does Meister. However, BuildForge does not do builds at all. It can remotely execute your existing build scripts, but there is little real value add to that. BuildForge is also famously expensive. What happens over the next few years to the high investment in multi-machine remote execution software as the number of machines declines, perhaps dramatically?

A similar argument can be for Electric Cloud’s Electric Accelerator product. It’s possible in some cases, for C/C++ builds to gain an edge by pushing a compile operation to another machine, and then bringing it back. You would only do this to gain access to additional CPU resources. In the past, you might have 8 build machines that Electric Accelerator would farm operations out to. Now, you can pull all those operations into a single machine and there is no need for that functionality. Also, you are stuck with converting your GNU makefiles into other GNU makefiles.

Meister is optimized for multi-core CPU build machines and offers multi-threaded capability to both build events and non-build workflow events. You know where your build is and there are fewer dependencies on network resources. Both BuildForge and Electric Accelerator add additional overhead to build administration to coordinate across multiple machines – a dying practice, that no organization wants to invest in. Meister is the best bet for a future with fewer build machines with more horsepower.