Case Study

Viasat
Viasat builds Chromium with EngFlow Remote Execution in one hour instead of the previous 24 hours. Developer productivity is up and security release times are down with every Chromium release.
Viasat

About Viasat

Viasat is a leading Global Satellite Communications company that has been in business since 1986 with over 7,000 employees and $2.8B in annual revenue. For decades, Viasat has been working to accelerate the internet over GEO satellite. One of Viasat’s key initiatives was to create the Viasat Browser. The Viasat Browser loads pages faster and uses artificial intelligence to get smarter and snappier as more people use it. Additionally, the Viasat Browser offers other features that make your browsing experience less cluttered, more secure, and more private.

24x

faster builds & tests
Goma (Chromium)
From 24 hours down to 1 hour
execution time

All. Chromium. Builds. Are. Slow!

Viasat’s Acceleration Research Technologies Division was tasked with developer experience and improving slow builds and tests for Viasat engineers. From local builds, to incremental, to full builds: The overall build experience was slow! Many engineers regularly experienced very long compiling waits from 6–8 hours up to 24 hours and sometimes even 48 hours! This was problematic for the major Chromium security patch that comes out every month.

Over the weekend I prepared builds for the upcoming merge. I finished 5 builds, which was not possible before EngFlow. What a substantial improvement!

CI had several concurrent builds going and it was still BLAZING fast!

I’ve been pretty blown away with the speed.

Happy Viasat engineers
 

24x Improvement!

EngFlow brought Viasat immediate value in multiple areas:

  • 24 hour builds to one hour! This has a massive, positive impact on the Viasat team. EngFlow enables the Viasat team to spend more time and resources on their brand new browser called Rebel.
  • Management of the remote execution cluster by EngFlow means no additional overhead for the Viasat engineering team.
  • EngFlow doesn’t require re-engineering the Chromium environment.
  • All. Builds. Became. Faster! Which helped multiple teams and environments achieve improvement in productivity.

Before EngFlow, every time Chromium released a security patch, we had to start in the morning and get back to it late in the day. Now we just go get a quick coffee and by the time we are back it is ready to be tested!
Timothy Flynn
Software Engineer @ Viasat

More time to focus on other key projects

Viasat is working on a new, open-source browser called Rebel. Rebel browser is a Chromium fork that enables easy rebranding, reducing the workload for Chromium forkers. EngFlow enables the developer engineering team to focus more time on Rebel releases because of their now lightning fast builds.

If you are interested in learning more about Viasat’s new open-source browser Rebel, you can find more information here: https://github.com/RebelBrowser/rebel

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