Posts: Snowflake

Bazel at Snowflake two years in

Two and a half years ago, I joined Snowflake to help their mission of migrating to Bazel. I spent the first year of this period as an Individual Contributor (IC) diving deep into the migration tasks, and then I took over the Tech Lead (TL) role of the team to see the project through completion.

This week, we publicly announced that we completed our migration to Bazel for the largest part of our codebase and we provided details on our journey. I did not publish that article here for obvious reasons, so… today’s entry is going to be a light one: all I want to do is point you at our announcement as well as the various other related articles that came before it.

March 14, 2025 · Tags: bazel, blogsystem5, snowflake
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BazelCon 2024 recap

Just like that, BazelCon 2024 came and went. So… it’s obviously time to summarize the two events of last week: BazelCon 2024 and the adjacent Build Meetup. There is A LOT to cover, but everything is here in just one article!

October 22, 2024 · Tags: bazel, blogsystem5, snowflake
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BazelCon 2023 et al. trip report

I’m exhausted. I just came back to Seattle from a 10-day trip in which I attended three different Bazel events: the Build Meetup in Reykjavik, the Bazel Community Day in Munich, and BazelCon 2023 in Munich too. Oh, and because I was on the other side of the world, I also paid a visit to my family in Spain.

Attending these events has been incredibly useful and productive: I got exposure to many ideas and discussions that would just not happen online, I got to build connections with very interesting people and, of course, it has also been super fun too to reconnect with old coworkers and friends.

This article contains the summary of the things I learned and the things I want to follow up on. These are just a bunch of cleaned-up notes which I took and are in the context of my work with Bazel at Snowflake and my interests on build tools, so this is not endorsed by Snowflake.

October 30, 2023 · Tags: bazel, blogsystem5, snowflake
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Build farm visualizations

If you have followed our recent infrastructure posts, you know by now that we are actively migrating Snowflake’s build to Bazel. What we haven’t shared yet is that we have deployed our own Build Barn cluster to support Bazel’s remote execution features. We have chosen to run our own build farm service for resource governance and security purposes, but also because the behavior of this system impacts the developer experience so directly that we want to have full in-house control and knowledge of it.

October 20, 2023 · Tags: bazel, snowflake
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Analyzing OOMs in IntelliJ with Bazel

A few months ago, we described how we fixed three different OOM scenarios in our ongoing migration to the Bazel build system here at Snowflake. Things had been sailing along just fine since then… but a new issue showed up recently: our IntelliJ with Bazel (IjwB) Java project started showing OOMs during its sync phase.

The reason this issue surfaced now is because, as we continue our migration to Bazel, our IjwB project has grown in size. Months ago, our project only covered a Java binary, but now that we have migrated all of its unit and integration tests as well, the project covers them too. It is common for tests to be more expensive to build and run than the binary they validate—tests depend on the binary’s dependencies plus many other helper tools for testing—and these caused the project to grow too big to fit in our development environments. Or did they?

October 7, 2023 · Tags: bazel, snowflake
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Addressing Bazel OOMs

Here at Snowflake, the Developer Productivity organization (DPE for short) is tackling some important problems we face as a company: namely, lengthening build times and complex development environments. A key strategy we are pursuing to resolve these is the migration of key build processes from CMake and Maven to Bazel.

We are still in the early stages of this migration and cannot yet share many details or a success story, but we can start explaining some of the issues we encounter as we work through this ambitious project.

March 16, 2023 · Tags: bazel, snowflake
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Farewell, Microsoft; hello, Snowflake!

After two years, it’s time for a change: I left Microsoft last week and I’m starting at Snowflake today. Read on for details on my stint in Azure Storage, why I ended up looking for a new role, and how I landed at this new company.

October 31, 2022 · Tags: featured, microsoft, personal-story, snowflake
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