Dagger Cloud Early Access

Today we’re thrilled to announce Early Access to our first commercial product: Dagger Cloud. 

What is Dagger Cloud?

Dagger Cloud is a centralized control plane that complements the decentralized Dagger Engine. The result is a complete platform that you can confidently put in production.

More specifically, every team rolling out Dagger has asked us the same three questions:

1. Where can I see my pipeline?

2. Where can I see all my organization’s pipelines?

3. How do I get great caching in CI?

Dagger Cloud answers those three questions with three features: Pipeline Visualization; Operational Insights; and Distributed Caching.

Bring Your Own Compute

Before talking about all the things Dagger Cloud does, let’s start with what it doesn’t do. Dagger Cloud is NOT a place to host a bunch of Dagger Engines. Our goal isn’t to replace your CI, but to make it better. Dagger Cloud is a “bring your own compute” service; the Dagger Engine can run on a wide variety of machines, including most development and CI platforms. And if the Dagger Engine can run on it, then Dagger Cloud supports it.

Pipeline Visibility

In a nutshell, we’re giving you the ability to visualize all aspects of a pipeline. One thing we see over and over again: a developer pushes code, the CI pipeline runs, and then…the pipeline fails and blocks the change from being merged. 

“It must be the pipeline! Let me just rerun it,” you say. But it fails again – is it breaking because of the changes you made to the code, or is the pipeline being flaky? 

Dagger Cloud helps you get to the root cause quickly so you can either fix your pipeline or fix your code and get your changes passing again in CI. We make it easy to drill down to detailed logs, understand how long operations took to run, and whether operations were cached. 

Operational Insights

We often see a Platform or IT ops team managing the CI/CD infrastructure and pipelines for app teams. Dagger Cloud gives those teams holistic visibility into the pipelines being used across the organization, enabling them to standardize and streamline processes, catch errors, and reduce duplication of effort. This includes observability of both pre-push and post-push pipelines. This is an area with huge potential and we expect to add a lot more trends and insights over time and the ability to optimize processes and pipelines. 

Distributed Caching

Wait, doesn’t the Dagger Engine already have caching? What’s Distributed Caching? One of Dagger’s superpowers is that it caches everything. On a single machine (like a laptop or long-running server), caching just works, because the same Dagger Engine writing to the cache is also reading from it. But in a multi-machine configuration (like an elastic CI cluster), things get more complicated because all machines are continuously producing and consuming large amounts of cache data. How do we get the right cache data to the right machine at the right time, without wasting compute, networking, or storage resources? This is a complex problem that requires a distributed caching service, to orchestrate the movement of data between all machines in the cluster, and a centralized storage service. Because Dagger Cloud receives telemetry from all Dagger Engines, it can model the state of the cluster and make optimal caching decisions. The more telemetry data it receives, the smarter it becomes.

Getting Started with Dagger Cloud

Dagger Cloud needed to be easy to evaluate and use. It takes only one token to set up, and you can start experiencing the benefits of Dagger Cloud within a few minutes after configuring your CI. Dagger Cloud supports a huge number of CIs. Basically, if you can run containers, then you can run Dagger Engines and you can use Dagger Cloud. Users report successfully leveraging Dagger with GitLab, CircleCI, GitHub Actions, Jenkins, Tekton, and many more. Dagger Cloud is built to support you wherever your data needs to be, featuring a global data storage service spanning 26 regions across 3 cloud providers: AWS, Google Cloud Platform, and Cloudflare R2. Dagger Cloud automatically selects the region closest to your compute.

How Do I Try It? How Much Does It cost?

As part of Early Access of Dagger Cloud, we are offering the Team plan for those collaborating with others and who will benefit most from distributed caching, shared pipeline visibility, and operational insights (or for anyone wanting to experience the full breadth of Dagger Cloud’s capabilities). We’ve tried to keep our pricing as simple as possible - after your free 2-week trial, you’ll pay just 5 cents per minute to use Dagger Cloud (the clock only runs while Dagger is running). 

See more here: https://dagger.io/pricing 

We’re thrilled to launch these capabilities which our community has so highly requested. As you know, we’re a community-first organization keen to hear your thoughts and feedback. Please feel free to jump on Discord give us your feedback on how well we hit the mark and what you’d like to see from us next.