Flare.build: more than a Bazel company

As our earliest customers know, Flare was the first-ever company started with the explicit goal of offering Bazel SaaS products and services in 2019, and since then, we’ve been thrilled to watch the community grow as more and more awesome companies have adopted the tool - the bet paid off! However one thing has become increasingly clear: onboarding to Bazel is still a huge challenge and a multi-year endeavor at scale in most cases, and it is often the case that specific teams lag behind the rest of the organization in adoption (oftentimes mobile teams, and for very understandable reasons).  As an answer to this, we’ve begun the work of integrating additional build and test tools into our platform as part of our effort to meet customers where they are instead of only upon successful completion of a migration effort, immediately unlocking much of the same value we provide to customers already building and testing with Bazel.  (This is actually not a new development; since early 2020, we’ve also provided the fastest and the only commercially available build cache solution available for Buck, a build tool inspired by Bazel).

A huge added benefit of adopting our standard tooling across teams and disparate build systems is the gathering and retaining the metrics driving DevX KPIs during or even absent a build tooling migration, something that can be challenging. By adopting flare.build before a full build system migration, it’s possible to easily retain continuity in this critical data, as well as minimize disruption to the developer experience.

In 2021, we’ve doubled-down on broadening our support with a series of integrations and acquisitions that expand our offerings far beyond Bazel and even into other stages of the software development lifecycle than the development phase (details coming soon). This month, we’ve taken the next step towards supporting our customers using other build & test tooling with our announcement of Gradle support, with many more integrations to be announced in the coming weeks.

We’ve been hard at work at tons of powerful new features for Flare.build v2, and will be sharing the full details on the new product soon.