We've been very busy this year! Before we all take a well-deserved winter break, here's a wrap-up of our announcements from the last few months.
Let's start with the numbers to close out 2022. We've consulted for more than 20 companies now! It's been enlightening to see so much variability in DevInfra approaches to Bazel, but also how many problems are common. We've spread the knowledge around on our blog, which has 4,200 monthly views. Working in the OSS community has always been our passion, so we have operated the documentation site for Bazel rules at docs.aspect.build for over 2,000 monthly active users. The community of Bazel users is now estimated at 600 companies and 50,000 engineers.
As Bazel consultants for the last two years, we've helped many of our clients achieve the promised benefits of Bazel on CI by solving the most common problems, such as keeping build agents warm, tuning cloud deployment parameters, and avoiding cache misses. Now, instead of paying our hourly rate to make your CI hum, we offer this as a turn-key, infrastructure-as-code product. At Bazelcon in November, we announced Aspect Workflows reached Alpha, and we've rolled it out to our first customer. They saw an immediate 70% drop in overall CI times, compared with their prior ephemeral, cold-start Bazel solution. Visit aspect.build/workflows for more details and to book a demo.
Aspect CLI is now 1.0! This is an open-source wrapper for Bazel that does so much more than Bazelisk. We pour consulting wisdom into this tool to reduce the support burden for us (and your DevX team) when product engineers trip over Bazel's usability issues. It also has a rich, gRPC-based plugin API, so you can integrate Bazel into your unique developer workflows. You can try it right now, starting at aspect.build/cli.
We have a long history with JavaScript and Node.js under Bazel. Thanks to a breakthrough new approach, we launched a game-changing new plugin for Bazel: rules_js. In December we've been busy migrating three large client codebases to use it and have tuned our tooling and approaches. We can do your migration at a fraction of the cost it would take for full-time engineers on staff. Book with us at aspect.dev
Speaking of professional services, with Bazel 6.0.0 about to land, we're also your best resource for upgrading to the new Bazel module manager, Bzlmod. A year ago, we were the first to write about it: https://blog.aspect.dev/bzlmod. Our engineers partnered with the core Bazel team at Google to write infrastructure that automatically mirrors new releases to the Bazel Central Registry and we added bzlmod support for JavaScript and Python. We can bring this expertise to your project and finally eliminate the maintenance nightmare of the WORKSPACE
file.
What's coming in 2023? We are excited to see more Bazel adoption and happier responses in developer productivity surveys.