Add blogpost about bonanza

blog/2025-03-24-bazel-buildbarn-and-bonanza/2025-03-24-bazel-buildbarn-and-bonanza.md

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+---
+slug: bazel-buildbarn-and-bonanza
+title: "Bazel, Buildbarn and Bonanza"
+authors: benjamin
+tags: [buildbarn, bazel]
+---
+
+# Bazel, Buildbarn and Bonanza
+
+In the Buildbarn event at Snowflake this week, Ed Schouten presented the work on
+the Bonanza project. Bonanza is a prototype for a drop in replacement Bazel with
+improvements to its communication protocols and written as client that performs
+all of its actions remotely, deduplicated and cacheable.
+
+# How is it different from Bazel?
+
+Bazel is written in an interesting manner. It is designed from the ground up to
+represent a stable description of a build that is reproducible from any
+developer's machine. Any developer can check out the same source code ask Bazel
+to analyze it and get the exact commands which Bazel would run to perform the
+build.
+
+This involves a lot of computation: Resolving bazel modules, downloading
+repository rules, executing them, analyzing the `.bzl` and `BUILD.bazel` files,
+and finally executing the actions themselves.
+
+Bazel internally represents these computation steps as pure functions returning
+deterministic values from a stable key, internally represented as `SkyFunctions`
+returning `SkyValues` from `SkyKeys`.
+
+A `SkyFunction` should return the same `SkyValue` given the same `SkyKey` which
+makes it a good candidate for being computed only once and have the result
+cached and fed throught to the next step. But peculiarly only the action
+execution itself has been offloaded to remote cache and execution.
+
+<!-- truncate -->
+
+![cache all the things](./all_the_things.webp)
+
+This is what Bonanza attempts to resolve. Instead of having all of that state
+computed and represented locally, repeated by each developer and discarded
+whenever a flag changes, Bonanza is designed from the ground up to offload all
+computations, downloads, and analysis to a remote cacheable system. This
+essentially reduces the client side to a very light weight program with the
+primary purpose of scanning the source code for modifications and uploading any
+local changes.
+
+# What's the current state?
+
+The project is still in an early state prototype state. In the presentation Ed
+demonstrated how far the prototype has come, and it was very impressive. The
+Bonanza client as of today is capable of analyzing the bb-storage codebase.
+
+There is still a lot remaining before it's a production ready system but it is
+very impressive progress. Bonanza is capable of running the full `bzlmod`
+resolution, fetching all relevant repository rules from upstream, run those
+repository rules, and analyzing the resulting codebase, basically performing
+everything a Bazel `cquery` does, all with fully remote and cacheable manner.
+
+For shops which lean heavily into remote caching and execution the remaining
+local load is often the bottleneck for your builds, the ability to offload the
+remaining pieces to your build cluster may be the next evolution of your build
+system.