Reducing Android Build Times on Azure by 80% using a Virtual Machine Scale Set (VMSS)
The Vipps App – until recently – took about 45 minutes to build on A$ure Azure. With a weekly release schedule, that might not sound like a huge dealbreaker, but since we’re using a “feature branch” approach to how we do git (ie no develop branch; master should always be deployable-ish), we don’t allow merging anything to master without a successful cloud build. Waiting for code review is hard to avoid, but additionally waiting for slow builds is just wrong. It’s not easy for our internal testers to check out what we’re doing either, they too are kept waiting. Suffice to say, the pain has been real. Personally, coming from a Golang background (where builds happen at the speed of your monitor’s refresh rate), this kind of wrecked my soul on a daily basis. Granted, Android builds are more complicated (I’m looking at you, Java ecosystem!) than single-binary Golang builds, but 40+ minutes for one app build is too slow nonetheless.
But like quite a few other companies dealing with payments and sensitive data, we’re stuck on Azure. I guess if you can’t do better than Azure, you can do better on Azure.
