Adobe

About Adobe

Founded in 1982 and headquartered in San Jose, California, global software company Adobe (officially known as Adobe Systems) is a leader in digital media solutions. Catering to individuals and companies, Adobe provides game-changing multimedia and creative software products. Among its popular products are Photoshop, Acrobat Reader, and Adobe Creative Cloud.

The Challenge: Running large projects compilations across the entire enterprise

Being one of the biggest names in modern visual design and one of the largest software companies in the world, Adobe holds major development operations across the globe and produces very large monolithic software projects.

One of the byproducts of this sort of operation was builds that were running unacceptably slow. Adobe’s development teams found themselves spending a lot of time waiting for compilations to complete, to the point that if developers used their own desktop, it would have taken a few hours to complete a single build. As an enterprise company employing many developers across the globe, this had a damaging effect on productivity and efficiency

The Solution – The New HPC: High Performance Compiling based on Incredibuild

Adobe sought out a solution that would allow it to mitigate slow build times and centralize the build environment while avoiding investment in additional hardware. Around eight years ago, Adobe turned to Incredibuild to reduce their build times across the entire enterprise. Sergey Levitskiy, manager of Platform Infrastructure team at Adobe looks back: “There was really no alternative to Incredibuild. The tight integration with Visual Studio, with other Microsoft products really made it a no-brainer for us to choose them.”

To support the whole organization and its vast development teams, the Platform Infrastructure team (responsible or various large scale infrastructure platforms) built multiple clusters of build nodes and offered Incredibuild as a centralized, self-service type of solution. Developers across the organization submit their code for compilation and promptly receive the accelerated results. Build time shrank from approximately 7.5 hours to 15 minutes, for example. Adobe calls this service handed to their employees, based on Incredibuild’s solution, “HPC”, but instead of the traditional interpretation as high-performance computing, it stands for High-Performance Compiling.

Adobe was able to offer this High-Performance Compiling practically on demand: “One of the benefits of Incredibuild is flexibility, in a way, that we can increase our build clusters as we see fit,” said Sergey, “when we onboard more and more development teams, we basically increase the size of our cluster in this or that location just to adapt to the size of the demand for the acceleration.”

Meeting Enterprise Needs

As Sergey noted, Incredibuild addressed Adobe’s specific needs as an enterprise organization: “We’ve partnered with Incredibuild for many years. We like their responsiveness and the ability to introduce new features into their offerings.”

Another aspect he discussed is stability: “Our Incredibuild based platform is very stable. I can’t recall a single platform wide outage.”

Incredibuild’s ROI

Reducing developer’s wasted time proved to be very worthwhile, as Sergey mentioned: “Every minute saved by the developer can be translated into dollars, extra profit for the company. We see that the investment into Incredibuild software has paid for itself many times over.”

Incredibuild also significantly reduces Capex, as Sergey explained: “Incredibuild allows us to not invest too much into hardware. If we calculate it in a way that every team needs to buy a set of high performing build machines, just this cost saving, not doing this, paid for the cost of the whole Incredibuild licenses many times over. I think this is a key value proposition for us and other customers.”