When the Defold extension system and the cloud builders were launched eight years ago it marked a milestone for Defold when game developers no longer had to rely on the Defold development team to provide integrations to third party services and platform specific features. Instead developers could write native code and add Lua bindings and have the code seamlessly integrated into the engine without installing any additional tools or SDKs.
A couple of months ago we made the decision to simplify the setup and operation of the build servers and we are now happy to announce that we’ve finished a large overhaul of the build servers. The servers are now split up into multiple instances where each instance is serving builds for a single platform. This will give us flexibility to quickly scale servers up and down depending on use, and even suspend servers that are inactive for a period of time.
The servers have also been migrated from Amazon Web Services to Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and the container images for each platform are available from a public container registry on GCP. The public container registry greatly simplifies the work involved in setting up your own local build servers or servers running on your own GCP account.
The new system has been running for a month and we are very happy with the results. The setup is easier to maintain and operate and it will help us save money. It is now also a lot easier for users to set up their own build servers in a few easy steps. Have a look at the instructions in the official manual and try it out yourself!
NOTE: The build servers will obviously remain available free of charge, but we would also like to remind everyone that the servers, storage and bandwidth are far from free. The Defold Foundation currently pays well over a €1000 each month for servers, storage and network traffic. If you are a regular user of the build servers (most users are) please consider donating through GitHub Sponsors, Patreon or PayPal.