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2026

The Burst Demand Crisis

I spend a lot of time with engineering leaders and developer infrastructure teams. Over the past six months, a pattern has been emerging: build queues are experiencing demand in bursts, not waves.

Last week alone, conversations in Sydney, Chicago, Los Angeles, and San Francisco all surfaced the same story:

  • Sunday: A customer running EngFlow Bazel RBE at 100,000+ cores wants to triple capacity over the next year. PR volume is surging with no sign of slowing.
  • Monday: Prospective customer's CI queue is in crisis. Engineering attention diverted from product work. First-time inquiry about RBE.
  • Tuesday: Existing customer tried sharding load across more CI workers. Result: higher cloud costs, same bottleneck. Needs help making workloads RBE-compatible.
  • Thursday: A large enterprise customer skipped our customer dinner - they were occupied with urgent internal testing, preparing to double their RBE load.
  • Friday: Reviewed load planning with a customer preparing for an AI generation hackathon - forecasting what their infrastructure must absorb in the coming months.

December 2025 Bazel Central Registry Outage

On December 26, 2025, Bazel users worldwide struggled with running their builds, as Bazel reported errors due to expired TLS certificates:

ERROR: Error computing the main repository mapping: Error accessing registry https://bcr.bazel.build/: Failed to fetch registry file https://bcr.bazel.build/modules/platforms/0.0.7/MODULE.bazel: PKIX path validation failed: java.security.cert.CertPathValidatorException: validity check failed