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Comment by dehrmann | Hacker News Reader

Who has a better CI offering these days? I moved to CircleCI after Travis CI abandoned its open-source support.

It's very easy to run your own GitLab-Runner (their open-source CI: https://docs.gitlab.com/runner/) on your server (or any cloud).

Set up within seconds using a few lines of cloud-init: https://gitlab.com/21analytics/gitlab-runner-cloud-init

Most of the time, it's also cheaper and maintenance is close to zero.

I second GitLab runner, used it a lot on bare metal CI servers, because we have some really exotic hardware requirements. Happy customer for 3 years now, and the CI part costs us nothing.

Gitlab is fantastic.

It was easy to take an existing open source terraform module [0], modify it a little for our purposes, and deploy runners that provision job executors in our tightly controlled VPC. It is very simple and everything is open source so you can really understand what it is doing. In our setup, all secrets are issued from our private vault instances. Most of them are short lived or one time use when possible. We are looking at moving our stuff to EKS now as well.

Overall, it was pretty easy to get going but we have the resources to do this. I could see why a small startup would outsource this to someone like Circle CI.

[0] https://registry.terraform.io/modules/npalm/gitlab-runner/aw...

IMO, CI as the product companies are done for, to some extent they built a business on GitHub not having CI built in, and now it does. (GitLab already did, and when have you seen a GitLab-hosted project using CircleCI or similar?)

The more Actions matures, the harder it is for them to continue - their market will be legacy projects already on the platform, and perhaps the new projects from companies already using it for older projects (the one reason I can think of to prefer Circle over Actions for a new GH-hosted project).

Buildkite[1]. You never give them any secrets. It is essentially a frontend for agents that live on your infrastructure in the cloud, e.g. AWS. The company I work for does the CI runs on spot instances which is perfect for this kind of interruptible work.

[1] https://buildkite.com/

Github actions are pretty amazing. It can run most CI workflows.

Azure Pipelines + GitHub Actions

We're on Google Cloud and pretty okay with Google Cloud Build - not as good and powerful as Buildkite but does not require us to run/maintain our own agents and one less vendor to manage.

Gitlab pipelines work well for me. I’m sure the Github and Azure offerings are on-par.

From my experience: no, Gitlab has a much better offering than GitHub.

Honestly, while there are some difference, the reduced integration overhead of using the offering from either your main cloud platform or your source code host probably wins.

Good old self hosted jenkins still does the job…

Yeah, but you do need to know how to set it up securely - this isn’t any better than the CircleCI incident: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34446673

If you're into AWS, CodeBuild.

Disclaimer: I work for AWS in Professional Services. All opinions are my own.

The beauty about CodeBuild is that there is no “lock-in”. All it is fundamentally is a Linux or Windows Docker container with popular language runtimes and a shell script that processes a yaml file or you can supply your own Docker container.

You just put a bunch of bash commands or PowerShell commands in the yaml file and it runs anything.

The Docker container and the shell scripts are all open source and you can quite easily run them locally.

I could see outside of AWS keeping your Docker containers for your specific build environments in a local repository and doing all of your builds inside them using Jenkins using a self hosted CodeBuild like environment.

https://github.com/aws/aws-codebuild-docker-images

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/codebuild/latest/userguide/use-c...

For a “batteries included” approach though, I really like Microsoft Azure DevOps Pipelines.

I’ve even done a couple of integrations between Azure DevOps and AWS when we had clients that are Microsoft shops.

https://aws.amazon.com/vsts/

For AWS, if you use CodeCommit (AWS git service), all access is via IAM and granular permissions. If you integrate with Azure DevOps, the AWS credentials do have to be stored in a separate MS hosted credential storage.

CodeBuild also supports at least Github natively.

I’m not shilling for AWS. I have an MS development background (.Net) and only have “DevOps” experience using AWS and Microsoft tooling.

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