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Android Builds

Building Android Automotive (AOSP) is one of the heaviest workloads in software: tens of gigabytes of source, long compile times, and big disk footprints. Null Autos runs these builds on elastic cloud compute and uses snapshots to keep them warm, so your team spends less time waiting.

How it works​

  1. Your pipeline runs on on-demand compute sized for big builds, with no permanent build farm to maintain.
  2. The job restores the most recent snapshot, so source trees, caches, and intermediate build state are already present instead of being fetched and rebuilt from zero.
  3. When the job finishes, it captures a new snapshot of the result.
  4. That snapshot can then boot directly into a cloud emulator for testing, so the build output and the device you test on share the same image lineage.

What you get​

  • Faster iteration. Warm builds avoid cold-start cost, and incremental work resumes from where the last build left off.
  • Elastic capacity. Builds scale onto cloud compute and scale back down when idle.
  • Reproducibility. Snapshots capture exact state, so builds and the emulators that boot from them are consistent across your team and your pipelines.
  • No build-farm ops. You do not manage or pay for idle build machines.

Source & CI integration​

Builds are driven from GitLab, both GitLab SaaS and self-managed. The platform integrates with your repositories and CI, and for large multi-repository projects (common in AOSP, which is assembled from many Git repos) it supports manifest-based workspaces and atomic cross-repository changesets. See:

Next steps​