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Aspect Workflows is a managed CI acceleration platform for Bazel monorepos. It provides self-hosted runners tuned for Bazel’s output-base model, a remote cache and remote execution cluster, and a Starlark task system that replaces hand-rolled CI scripting. Customers typically see cached builds complete in under a minute, overall CI time cut by 2–3×, and cloud compute costs drop 40–80%.

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Deployment options

Self-hosted (your cloud): Workflows deploys into your AWS or GCP account via Terraform. Your source code, secrets, and build artifacts never leave your infrastructure. A dedicated cloud project keeps cost attribution and access policies isolated from other systems. Aspect Cloud (hosted): Aspect operates a fully isolated, single-tenant deployment on your behalf. You get the same performance and feature set without managing cloud infrastructure.

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Core components

Elastic CI runners — Persistent VMs that keep Bazel’s in-memory state and a populated NVMe-backed output base warm across jobs. New runners restore from a warming archive so cold-start overhead is eliminated. The pool scales to zero when idle. Remote cache — A content-addressable cache co-located with your runners in the same VPC. Bazel checks the cache before executing any action; on a hit, the output is fetched and the action is skipped. Remote Build Execution — A worker pool that executes Bazel actions in parallel across many machines. On a cache miss, work fans out horizontally rather than serializing on a single runner. AXL tasks — aspect build, aspect test, aspect format, aspect lint, aspect gazelle, and aspect delivery replace hand-written CI scripts. Each task handles Bazel flag configuration, artifact upload, and CI platform integrations (GitHub Status Checks, Buildkite Annotations, GitLab job annotations) internally. Code review integration — The Marvin bot streams build results, test failures, and lint annotations to your pull requests as the job runs — with one-click suggested fixes for lint findings. Web UI — A dashboard showing cache hit rate, test failure trends, and per-runner performance over time.

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CI platform support

Aspect Workflows integrates with GitHub Actions, Buildkite, GitLab CI/CD, and CircleCI. Your pipeline calls aspect <task> in each CI step; the tasks self-configure based on the runner environment and CI provider.

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Getting started

Deployment requires someone with an infrastructure or DevOps background and typically takes 4–8 hours of active work. Aspect handles provisioning, monitoring, upgrades, and 24/7 support throughout.