01Overview
DevForge is a self-hosted CI/CD orchestrator built around content-addressed caching, ephemeral KVM runners, and a declarative DAG of build steps. It replaced three legacy systems for a fintech client and now runs 14,000+ pipelines per week.
The control plane is a NestJS service backed by PostgreSQL with logical sharding by tenant. Runners are ephemeral Firecracker VMs scheduled by a custom Kubernetes operator that bin-packs by predicted job duration.
02The Problem
Existing pipelines averaged 11 minutes for a five-line PR. Engineers were context-switching to Slack while builds finished, killing focus.
03Approach
- Modeled every step as a pure function of inputs → output artifacts and hashed inputs to skip 70%+ of work on incremental builds.
- Built a Kubernetes operator that pre-warms a pool of runners scaled by a 5-minute moving average of queue depth.
- Replaced Docker-in-Docker with rootless Buildkit + Firecracker for a 4x speedup on container builds.
04Outcome
P50 pipeline duration dropped from 11m to 1m32s.
Compute spend down 38% YoY despite a 3x increase in pipeline volume.
Adopted by four product teams in the first quarter.