Blacksmith

High-performance CI infrastructure

Blacksmith runs GitHub Actions substantially faster and more cheaply by owning and operating its own global fleet of bare-metal machines rather than renting generic cloud VMs — the performance gap coming from hardware control that a virtualised layer cannot offer. It operates thousands of machines across multiple regions, regularly schedules over 100,000 vCPUs concurrently and manages its own petabyte-scale Ceph cluster. The founding team brings deep systems experience from building search and ads infrastructure at Faire and operating large distributed systems at Cockroach Labs, and is extending the same infrastructure further.