Pricing for Inspecode and Docstand

Hello everyone. Today, we would like to explain the pricing structure for our upcoming releases of Inspecode and Docstand. These new releases of both products are planned for ~~the end of May~~ later this year*.

At Rocro, we want to offer you, our user, what we consider to be a fair and simple pricing structure. As such, you will be charged for the number of CPU cores that you sign up for in your contract. You can configure your cores to run in parallel, which will make your jobs run faster.

Initially, we will offer Free and Professional plans for both products. The details of these plans are shown in the pricing pages of Inspecode and Docstand.

As shown in the chart, if you use either product with only one core, there is no charge. Under this Free plan you will be allocated 1500 minutes per month. When we initially go live, we will offer a promotion giving you unlimited running time.

To use either product with more than one core, purchase the Professional plan. Each core will cost $50 per month.

How many cores do you need? It’s your decision, but here are some guidelines: For a ten person team using Inspecode, we recommend using eight cores. This is the number of cores that is currently available to beta users. For a five person team, we recommend four cores.

For Docstand, we recommend two cores for most cases, even for a ten person team.

This pricing structure is deeply connected to the nature of our services. Inspecode and Docstand execute jobs in parallel automatically. You can control performance by adjusting the number of CPU cores. More cores, faster results. Regardless of team size. As explained in the previous blog post, you can even optimize CPU resource allocation manually.

If you are an existing beta user of Inspecode or Docstand, you will automatically be migrated to the Free plan when the new release starts.

The Free and Professional plans can both be used for personal or business purposes.

If you have any questions about our pricing plans, reach out to us at support@rocro.com.

* Seeing that the user registration rate increased more than three times since Rocro announced the new free and professional plans, we decided to extend the current free offering for a few months. The free offering includes 8 CPU cores. (Updated May 30th, 2018.)

Accelerating CI – Part 2: Optimization of resource allocation

In the previous blog, I focused on accelerating CI by parallelization. However, since there is a limit to the hardware resources because of their costs, therefore efficient distribution of the limited resources to parallel tasks is the key to further speeding up. In this blog, I will show you how to improve job throughput by optimizing the allocation of CPU usage.

In Rocro, a series of processes caused by events such as git-push and pull requests are called jobs and processes executed on individual containers in jobs are called tasks. In other words, a job is a collection of tasks. For example, in the following rocro.yml, the entire process set in YAML is a job and the process of each tool (such as gofmt), setup process for executing these tools, etc. are tasks.

inspecode:
    gofmt: default
    golint: default
    go-test: default

Since the execution time of a job depends on the slowest task, in order to improve the throughput of the job, it is necessary to level the execution time of each task as much as possible. For Inspecode/Docstand, CPU usage can be specified by cpu option in rocro.yml. cpu: 1 indicates that the tool can use one CPU core to its full extent. With cpu: 1, 3.75 GiB memory is allocated and the allocation is proportional to the CPU usage. You can specify the amount in 1/1000th units by specifying the usage amount with a decimal fraction such as cpu: 0.25 or by adding m (milli) at the end. cpu: 250m is equivalent to cpu: 0.25.

If go-test takes the longest time in the above rocro.yml, assigning more CPU resources to go-test than the other tools will improve the processing time of the whole job:

inspecode:
    gofmt:
        machine:
            cpu: 0.25
    golint:
        machine:
            cpu: 500m
    go-test:
        machine:
            cpu: 1.25

This level of finer optimization of CPU resources is not available in other CI tools and services. Inspecode/Docstand are completely free during the beta period and you can use a total of 8 CPU cores for free. So I hope you can try out various optimizations.

Accelerating CI – Part 1: Parallelization

Hello everyone, I am the CTO of Rocro Inc. Today, I will start the Rocro Engineering Blog. In this blog, we hope to convey not only about our products but also the various know-how gained through the product development.

Rocro is a group of web services for software developers using GitHub and Bitbucket. Amidst many excellent services already available in the market, why did I started this Rocro project? One of the reasons is to further accelerate CI. With many-core processors and auto-scalable cloud services becoming more and more popular, the best way to accelerate CI is by dividing jobs as finely as possible and parallelizing them. In this part, I will explain about how Rocro supports parallelization.

Rocro’s Inspecode/Docstand executes all tools in parallel^*1. For example, if you write rocro.yml like the following in Inspecode, the three tools (gofmt, glint, go test) will run in parallel.

inspecode:
    gofmt: default
    golint: default
    go-test: default

In this way, you can parallelize the execution of tools just by arranging the tool names. Even without rocro.yml, Inspecode will detect the major language in the Git repository and automatically execute the appropriate tools in parallel.

It is also possible to split the input given to the tool for further parallelization. For example, by writing the following rocro.yml, the input of go test is split into two and executed in parallel.

inspecode:
    gofmt: default
    golint: default
    go-test:
        - input:
            - /path/to/package1
            - /path/to/package2
        - input:
            - /path/to/package3
            - /path/to/package4

If the execution time of a specific tool is dominant over the time of the entire job, then it is not so fast with the tool level parallelization alone. In such a case, it is better to split the tool input in appropriate way to accelerate the execution.

In the next part, I will talk about accelerating CI by optimizing resource allocation.

*1 In order to perform automatic optimization and parallelization, rocro.yml adopts declarative description style as much as possible.