Testing Bazel's Remote Execution API

[Laurence Urhegyi]

Hi all,

Some of us in the community have recently been collaborating on an
independent test suite for the Remote Execution API [0], and I thought
it was worth sharing with this audience.

We're aiming to capture:
* Compatibility status between clients and server implementations of the
RE-API
* Performance metrics for the server implementations: end-to-end build
times, CPU and memory usage

We're really interested in knowing how the server implementations make
use of resources in order to improve execution times, and thus reduce
any elapsed time in a typical development cycle.

We've reached a point now where we are regularly running build pipelines
and capturing the results [1]. I won't go into all the details in this
mail, but there's a blog post [2] outlining exactly how we got here.

So, if you are interested in analysing the performance of the RE-API
server implementations, then take a look at the performance metrics
dashboards on the project wiki. And feel free to get involved in the
project, contributions are very welcome!

Hope to see some of you next week in London.

Cheers,
Laurence

[0] https://gitlab.com/remote-apis-testing/remote-apis-testing
[1]
https://gitlab.com/remote-apis-testing/remote-apis-testing/wikis/Metrics
[2]
https://www.codethink.co.uk/articles/2019/testing-bazels-remote-execution-api/