(posting some extras as comments since the original post is already way too long)
How does Reflame deploy so quickly?
Some major contributors:
- Reflame never does more work than absolutely necessary for any change. Every JS/TS module deployed through Reflame is transformed and shipped as independent ES modules. Only modules that have never been seen before are transformed and deployed (taking advantage of content-addressing to simplify caching). This means Reflame isn't just fast when our projects are small. It will stay just as fast as we scale to hundreds or thousands of modules. Because it will continue to do the minimum amount of work possible for every change.
- Reflame always deploys via the most direct possible path. A typical deploy of a trivial hello world project using a traditional CI service consists of: a git commit & push from our laptops, waiting for a webhook from github, spinning up a VM or container, cloning the git repo, installing npm dependencies, transforming and bundling source code, and finally uploading the output. Each of these steps has a latency floor measured in seconds, adding up to 10s of seconds of latency to deploy even the smallest change. Compare that to a deploy with Reflame's VSCode extension: we get a file change event, we upload the file, our server transforms it and stores the output for serving. Done.
- Reflame is completely region-agnostic. We haven't yet figured out how to make light move faster in fiber optics, but we can lower the effective latency floor it imposes by having servers close to our users. Reflame lives in 3 regions today: 1 in western US, 1 in eastern US, 1 in central EU, and we'll be adding more based on customer demand. Each region is a first class citizen. Updates in each region are visible immediately to users in that region, and replicated asynchronously to all others. We also have some magic in our CDN to ensure previews get routed to the originating region so customers can collaborate using previews across the world without dealing with replication delays.
How does Reflame deploy so quickly?
Some major contributors:
- Reflame never does more work than absolutely necessary for any change. Every JS/TS module deployed through Reflame is transformed and shipped as independent ES modules. Only modules that have never been seen before are transformed and deployed (taking advantage of content-addressing to simplify caching). This means Reflame isn't just fast when our projects are small. It will stay just as fast as we scale to hundreds or thousands of modules. Because it will continue to do the minimum amount of work possible for every change.
- Reflame always deploys via the most direct possible path. A typical deploy of a trivial hello world project using a traditional CI service consists of: a git commit & push from our laptops, waiting for a webhook from github, spinning up a VM or container, cloning the git repo, installing npm dependencies, transforming and bundling source code, and finally uploading the output. Each of these steps has a latency floor measured in seconds, adding up to 10s of seconds of latency to deploy even the smallest change. Compare that to a deploy with Reflame's VSCode extension: we get a file change event, we upload the file, our server transforms it and stores the output for serving. Done.
- Reflame is completely region-agnostic. We haven't yet figured out how to make light move faster in fiber optics, but we can lower the effective latency floor it imposes by having servers close to our users. Reflame lives in 3 regions today: 1 in western US, 1 in eastern US, 1 in central EU, and we'll be adding more based on customer demand. Each region is a first class citizen. Updates in each region are visible immediately to users in that region, and replicated asynchronously to all others. We also have some magic in our CDN to ensure previews get routed to the originating region so customers can collaborate using previews across the world without dealing with replication delays.