What sort of things did you optimize to improve the build times?
I could have done that with Gradle but we also want to support multiple languages (Java, Python, NodeJS & React, Golang).
Bazel's caching abilities are by far the best I've ever worked with because it understands the full source tree. It can also cache test executions. There's some tests in my code that make sure I'm calling out to crypto libraries correctly and these tests take >30 seconds to execute but almost never change. With bazel I can feel free to write as many of those integration tests as I want since they will only ever be rerun when something effects them (I.E. I change the version of my crypto library).
> Honestly, while the theory is that you can Dockerize your build and you can do remote caching with Bazel I've never seen anyone do it
Yea, you likely don't want to run bazel within a docker container, you want to build a Docker container within bazel [0]. The performance of this way of doing things is much better. My monorepo has >30 services and `docker-compose up --build` was becoming super slow. To address this I've written bazel_compose [1] to obtain the same workflow docker-compose offers you with bazel as your container build system. It also supports a gradual migration scheme and will build both the Dockerfile AND the bazel version of your container to make sure they both start.
Unfortunately the bazel community is mainly populated with companies who are 100x the size of the average and as such they already cant run all of their services on their dev machines and so they don't see the value of something like this. This version of bazel_compose is out of sync with HEAD @ caper but if you're adventurous I'd recommend checking it out. It has extra features to watch all of the source files using ibazel and will automatically build&restart containers (<<10 seconds in my experience) as you edit and save code.