About Brave

Brave is a browser company on a mission to fix the web by giving users a safer, faster and better browsing experience. From networking to UI and from the renderer to the HTML/CSS, browsers are made up of over 30 million lines of code and require compiling tens of thousands of files.

In their blog post Brave shared multiple challenges they addressed to improve their development process. An integral component was moving their builds to EngFlow’s remote execution offering.

Slow build times kill productivity

Brave has been on a journey to automate and improve their browser build process for years. Developing incrementally, building and running unit and integration tests takes engineers hours and requires context switching, making the feedback cycle slow. On top of that, hardware differs across developers and local builds are non-reproducible or not suitable for QA.

8x faster builds with EngFlow

With EngFlow Remote Execution, Brave’s Android, Linux, macOS, and Windows Chromium builds are now distributed across a large number of machines – instead of running everything on a single, local machine with sometimes as few as four cores. The EngFlow remote execution cluster executes builds for all platforms on a Linux-based backend consisting of hundreds of cores, cross-compiling when targeting different operating systems or architectures. This simplifies the infrastructure greatly while also saving thousands of dollars. Additionally, using remote execution allows sharing compiled objects between all developers, reducing unnecessary, repetitive building. Builds are also hermetic and reproducible.

Saving big bucks on developer hardware

Offloading the builds from local developer machines to the remote execution cluster has also lessened the requirements for developer machine. This enables considerable savings for developer hardware purchases.

Faster time-to-market: happier customers, happier developers

Brave provides over 50 million users a seamless browser experience. With EngFlow, Brave can now scale the development process and ship features faster while also keeping developers happy.