EngFlow 2024 Year End Wrap

As we look forward to 2025, we are grateful to our employees, customers, and the broader build community for the continued investment in achieving our mission of making developers productive and happy to keep Engineers in Flow.

In 2024 EngFlow continued our multi-year track record of exponential growth. This year we onboarded some of the most complex and advanced engineering organizations across autonomous driving, e-commerce, SaaS, finance, and chip manufacturing, resulting in significant developer velocity and cloud cost savings for these teams.

EngFlow has become more than a platform provider - we are elevating the developer experience practice for our customers, continuously pushing the cost and performance innovation, passing the savings directly to our customers. We are connecting engineers working on similar technologies to share best practices and talent across the Bazel, Buck2, Chromium, AOSP, and CMake ecosystems. While doing that, we're enriching our customers with music and are making the planet a greener place (read more about this below)!

From our early days, we have set our company’s priorities in the following order: Happy Team, Happy Customers, More Happy Customers. We’d like to provide you with a few updates in that construct.

Happy team

• Our annual summit tradition is to bring the whole company together at a fun destination for a few days of tech and business talks, local culture exploration and getting to know each other. This year we welcomed our new employee based in Barcelona by bringing the whole company there for our annual summit! Learn more about our productive and fun Barcelona global summit. Our team is looking forward to meeting in 2025 in Austria!
• It’s been a year of hard work for our team, so we offered a few opportunities to wind down towards the year end, including holiday games and baking with a British Baking show chef. Our creations turned out to be delicious and intriguing!
• This year we have grown quite a bit, and unsurprisingly faced some typical organizational scaling challenges. In response, we have re-organized for more efficiency, invested in growing our leaders and team, and are hiring across engineering, sales, customer success and more - join our team.

Happy customers

Customer management

• We are partnering with our customers to manage their success with the EngFlow platform and DevOps practices holistically. This year we have implemented a Quarterly Business Review (QBR) practice for all our customers, where we demonstrate the value of using the platform, and offer best practices for our customers’ strategic DevOps initiatives.

• Our customers loved seeing the price of their cloud costs go down (in some cases as impactful as $20k/month to $11k/month) while developer velocity increased, as a result of numerous improvements such as new versions of our autoscaler (50% more efficient than cloud provider defaults), pool recommender, action coalescing, and storage optimization.

New capabilities

• Multi-tenancy: while we offer a single tenant deployment model for our platform, we have implemented new features to let our large enterprise customers implement internal charge-backs of the platform and cloud cost to individual departments for cost and efficiency transparency.
• Bring your own worker pools: our customers are now able to manage a pool of on-prem workers as part of the EngFlow remote execution and remote caching platform. This enables them to experiment with ML workflows and simulations by taking advantage of the latest hardware, such as Nvidia dev kits or custom devices, or save more on the total cost of ownership by leveraging existing on-prem hardware for parts of the workload while leveraging cloud for bursty load.
• Observability: focused on making our user experience more responsive and helpful, including Improved invocation and target tree visualizations to being near instantaneous for faster debugging. The new Invocation Compare feature helps identify issues and opportunities. A “Show Differences Only” toggle allows users to pinpoint differences that may cause issues or impact performance. By providing summaries, Bazel flags, execution environment, and details across invocations, this view provides valuable insight for refining and debugging builds.

Unique customer experiences

• EngFlower piano: we leveraged the annual San Francisco Flower Piano event and hosted our special version of it where our customers came together with their families for some musical fun, and got to see one of Bazel's prolific contributors in a new light. See for yourself! We know many folks in software engineering are also talented musicians, so let us know if you'd like to cohost our next customer musical jam event in your location!
• EngFlow Customer Forest: as a display of our gratitude we are planting EngFlow Customer Forests all over the world! This new program starts in 2024 with a forest in Germany, as that’s the country where EngFlow originally started. We will be sharing updates on our Customer Forests, and look forward to seeing these forests grow exponentially year after year!

More happy customers

Cloud partnerships

• AWS ISV Partnership: This year AWS recognized EngFlow as an ISV Partner which means our customers are going to save money on AWS even further - as they can use EngFlow purchases towards their AWS EDP commit, and will be getting the benefit of a more comprehensive account coverage and technical support we can offer jointly with AWS. This also means that we are able to sponsor part of the cloud costs of doing a new trial for our future customers!

• GCP Marketplace: We now have GCP Marketplace listing, allowing our customers to save even more on GCP and count EngFlow purchases towards their GCP commits and get the convenience of combined billing.

Build community investment

BazelCon

• We partnered with the Linux Foundation and other vendors in the Bazel ecosystem on moving the ownership of BazelCon to Linux foundation. EngFlow became one of the Platinum sponsors, on the same level as Google, ensuring the conference remains free to all attendees.

• We shared our product updates and team’s expertise in multiple talks:

  • { Fast, Cost-effective } – Choose Two
  • Post Mortems for 4 Years of Remote Execution
  • {Fast, Correct, Secure} - Choose Three

• Many of our customers shared their Bazel and Remote Execution best practices, such as MongoDB and Canva to name a few.

CPPCon

• At the conference of 800 attendees we learned that a lot of C++ developers are quite fond of the CMake build system, and are excited to be offering a CMake RE jointly with Tipi.dev - sign up here
• We sponsored CPPCon this year, the major conference for the C++ community. See our lightning talks, such as Do you love or hate your build system? and C++ and Rust Bindings - Mixing It Best With CMake

EngFlow Blog: we continue to share our team’s experience and best practices with the build community. As Bazel launched version 7, we migrated to Bzlmod, uncovered a series of open source improvements which our team members contributed upstream to go and scala codebases, and published a Bzlmod migration blog series for those who are contemplating doing that.

Meetup.build around the world

• We continued to bring the build community together by partnering with companies impactful in the Bazel, CMake and Buck2 ecosystems, and hosted events in Amsterdam with Booking.com, Boston with Zoox, Munich with Apex.ai, Tokyo with Google, Mountain View with LinkedIn and JetBrains, and Menlo Park with Meta. Stay tuned for our meetup recaps as we continue to update on our blog.
• Meetup.build is your hub to know what’s coming up and to suggest partnering with us. Check out the London and Munich meetups we’re currently planning with our partners, and let us know where you’d like to join or host in this form!

It’s been a fulfilling year for EngFlow. Behind every accomplishment there are months or years of hard work and grit, behind wins there are losses and learnings. We have grown together and individually, personally and professionally, and are so grateful for our team and our customers who choose to work with EngFlow every day! Cheers to a successful 2025 for all!