Most people's CI issues can be solved in three easy steps.<p>1/ Get an actual, real machine. We run all of our CI for 10 devs out of a single 13900K / 64GB RAM machine, from a Jenkins setup that I've done over a weekend that has a single runner. 5-10 minute runs for PR validations (500kloc app, shitloads of tests, etc), 3 minutes for app builds. Buy it and host it yourself, or rent from Hetzner. You don't need a sysadmin for that. Machine is fucked ? Just restart it lol. Dependencies out of date ? Just upgrade your dockerfile, or your ansible setup and reinstall it all. Used to use Gitlab runners, Bitrise, Github Actions, etc. They're all too slow, because all these services make money on allocating as little as possible to you to stack as many clients as possible on the same server. Pretty UIs are not worth 45 minute builds.<p>2/ Cache. Cache. Cache. Cache. Cache. It isn't hard if you're not looking for perfect. Nobody cares if sometimes, randomly you have one small module that rebuilds even though it shouldn't have: the beefy machine is here to make sure it takes 10 seconds anyways. All that matters is that you never have a cache that says even though it shouldn't. And to solve this: don't make the cache yourself. Your build tool either has it (Gradle, Maven, Webpack, etc), or there's a widely used tool that works (ccache, etc.). How do you store your cache ? Not on the build machine. Because that fucking sucks. Make it a remote cache (If using gradle, you can pay for enterprise if you're feeling optimistic, host a gradle remote cache yourself, or use <a href="https://github.com/androidx/gcp-gradle-build-cache" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/androidx/gcp-gradle-build-cache</a> and forget about it. The running costs of it have been well under a hundred dollars over a year).<p>3/ Less important, but know your build tool. I've spent a lot of time rewriting Gradle projects to avoid cross configuration, allow configuration caching, allow parallel configuration, etc. The same applies to everything else. Your build tool should be part of your knowledge.