Description:

We have started extending and enabling what is run in the Windows CI pipeline and found the Azure Pipelines build environment is severely underpowered to do a fully local build in a timely manner. While we may look in to using a user-managed Azure Pipelines worker, we should also explore the idea of using bazel RBE as the Linux CI does to cut down build times etc. Other projects (namely gRPC and tensorflow) seem to have success with this in their CI.

Questions:

• Are there any restrictions or limitations to the Google hosted RBE product that would prevent us from using it for the Envoy project CI builds?
  • Since Windows security is key (and the execution environment may not be via Hyper-V isolated containers), is it restricted to Google owned projects only or can we set up Envoy to use it?
• What is the correct entrypoint to start setting up RBE for Envoy CI? (the envoy-build-tools repo + setting up a toolchain? etc.)

Links:

• PR to enable Windows CI: Windows compilation: enable compiling expanded list of extensions in envoy-static #10542
  • Example build that fails due to heap error in cl.exe: https://dev.azure.com/cncf/envoy/_build/results?buildId=36492&view=logs&jobId=2d2b3007-3c5c-5840-9bb0-2b1ea49925f3&j=2d2b3007-3c5c-5840-9bb0-2b1ea49925f3&t=168f295b-0553-5364-35f7-923225ecd8b3
• Draft PR with experiments around Windows CI environment: Draft: Information gathering/experimenting with Windows CI Workers #10610
  • Example build running 1 test (that takes over an hour): https://dev.azure.com/cncf/envoy/_build/results?buildId=36568&view=logs&j=2d2b3007-3c5c-5840-9bb0-2b1ea49925f3&t=168f295b-0553-5364-35f7-923225ecd8b3