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Comment by mtlynch | Hacker News Reader

It appeals to me as someone who likes Circle's CI offering but wants to move away from Github.

I tried using Gitlab's CI and was surprised at how limited it was. The Gitlab CI syntax was harder to follow, and my integration tests took 17m to run when they ran in almost 1/3 the time on Circle.

A big part of the problem was that CircleCI lets me use an instance with 8 CPUs / 16 GB RAM with just a config file change[0], whereas every Gitlab instance is 1 CPU / 3.75 GB RAM unless you host your own runners.[1] But if I'm paying a company to manage CI, I don't want to provision my own hardware infrastructure

[0] https://circleci.com/docs/configuration-reference#docker-exe...

[1] https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/ci/runners/saas/linux_saas_runner...

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Related, GitHub has had 'use more powerful hosted runners' in the pipeline for over 2 years[0]. This issue replaced another now-deleted issue[1] from July 2020.

Really disappointing, as I've had to resort to using `az vm start` -> run -> `az vm deallocate` to use an on-demand powerful runner.

0: https://github.com/github/roadmap/issues/161

1: https://github.com/github/roadmap/issues/95 (note: added `ga` `ae` and removed `beta` `cloud` labels on Oct 13, 2020 ; the previous text: https://web.archive.org/web/20200731200411/https://github.co... )

As a former CircleCI customer (my new employer uses Gitlab) I can highly recommend them. They make that issue so easy. You can even request GPU machines and it all works really well.

Why are you a former customer?

They said that their new employer uses Gitlab. The link in the OP describes that before today you couldn't use both at the same time.

I moved job.

I'm a bit biased as one of the founders of BuildJet, but we solve this exact issue.

BuildJet for GitHub Actions, plugs elegantly into GitHub Actions. With 1-line change in your config, you get 2x speed for half of GitHub's price.

Check it out @ https://buildjet.com/for-github-actions

Quick question, why does every startup on earth have google as a customer? Shouldn't a company of this size have its own solutions and programs?

This is in no way a deg against your project, its just a general question .

I imagine non-core-product teams at Google are encouraged to submit purchase requests for any tools they think would improve their processes instead of being constrained to existing solutions. They also could just be showing it because someone with an @google.com has a paid account, but I don't know for sure :)

I would think that it also brings the advantage of having tried the actual product in their own ecosystem, Google have a good overall insight into it in case they want to buy it - not sure if this is actually the case though.

Yeah, it's kind of a trope by now. However, we felt it was justified when Google Lighthouse wanted to use BuildJet.

Oh this is good. I couldn't find it in your documentation but how big are the disks on these VMs?

Oh, should probably add that to the docs. Anyway, they are 120 GB.

Absolutely. That's a huge jump over GitHub's tiny 14GB

We recently started using buildjet, and it has been nothing short of awesome. So I can highly recommend them.

Great market fit, runners are the worst part of GitHub Actions so I'm really glad to see a product enter this space as a drop-in replacement. Will definitely check this out for my pipelines.

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