Comment by mcnichol | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mcnichol | Hacker News Reader

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Not to rain on the parade here but this is literally a copy-pasta product.

Jenkins, Google Borg, Cloud Foundry, Concourse Pipelines...and surprise surprise when you look at where he came from...Ex-Google, Ex-VMW, RabbitMQ...

If OP wasn't in and around the source of all these tools above then they were at the very least first cousins to the story.

The sales cycle is long, integrations require multiple dimensions of executive buy-in, especially security and networking.

I think they made something nice but it felt like a nothing-burger story about something that is constantliy oscillating between bespoke and commoditized due to upstream problems that are such a mix of issues. Lack of oversight to micromanagement, inexperience to too much experience that they cannot let go of "the way it's always done".

It may be just my unpopular opinion but you are boiling an ocean of problems selling toolchains. Business and Tech are like water often finding the holes that lead to a path of least resistance, even when these erode the foundation of "core business". Toolchains that behave like guidelines and "parenting strategies" with removable guardrails have always offered the greatest rewards in my experience.

> Not to rain on the parade here but this is literally a copy-pasta product.

More to the point, the product offered no compelling reason to use it, let alone pay for it.

Being "fast" is not a selling point. Developers don't want slow pipelines, but that does not mean they want fast pipelines. The speed that the pipeline works is more depending on how the pipeline is setup than the overhead of the pipeline service, and other CICD services are already blazing fast. Take for instance CircleCI, which is already a tough sell over GitHub actions and GitLab CICD: how did the service stood out? Did it added tangible value over GitHub/Gitlab/CircleCI/etc? Shaving milliseconds off a minutes-long build ain't it.

> Being "fast" is not a selling point

It could be, if that is a pain point for the customer. You could be 10x faster than any other option, but if "slow builds" are not on the top 10 list of problems they are dealing with, it's a meaningless statistic.

> It could be, if that is a pain point for the customer.

But is it, though?

I mean, are any of the competing CICD services noticeably slow, specially if we focus on the system's overhead?

I don't think there are, at all.

We're talking about at best millisecond differences in workflows that take minutes just to do the things we tell them to, such as setting up a build environment.

I'm only hearing about Earthly through this blog post, but is their optimization just shaving time off of overhead? From their landing page, it sounds like their system made caching and build targets a first class feature.

> Rebuild only what has changed, automatic parallel execution, automatic caching with no configuration required for the entire pipeline, no upload/download of cache – instantly available

You _could_ get these benefits on other providers like CircleCI, but it would require a lot more work/customization.

Absolutely.

If you told me:

"This pipeline will automatically perform all of your [insert line of business] testing, batteries included.

XYZ has signed off that if you get to the end of this pipeline you do not need to jump through any hoops to get to production." I would be screaming on a soapbox

There is too much process to know about a company to make any claim with any certainty and these companies will not tell you their process because you are a salesman, not their friend. Technology Sales is "Frenemys" at best and "Inherited Cancer" at worst.

Here's a pitch for OOP. If you do this you will have a line around the door: "You can run this on your own internal cloud, public cloud, or mix of both. Hit the eject button and it will give you a [Docker, CircleCI, Jenkins, Travis] playbook to lift and shift your pipeline. Every app that goes through alerts each C?O that cares how it meets their KPI, Security Whatever, etc.

Set the bar as high as you want to get through the pipeline. Mission Critical? Core Business? Skunkwerks? This can be in the DMZ, this can't...you make the rules, we are the engine that enforces them."

I can tell you right now, your success will be predicated on Networking and Security teams that work together effectively and selling high enough to start the ball rolling.

We have this absurd "Throw paint at a wall and see what sticks" approach to doing business and then "People don't really want what I made" response when it fails. Look inward.

Reliable, configurable, and compatible. That's what, at least from the work I do, seems to be what the market is looking for.

Most CI/CD for sizeable companies have integrations into other systems, such as static analysis and things lime SBOM. Those tools tend to take a bunch of time outside the CI. They also need to ensure the results from those tools can break builds along with other alerting. Eventually the CI itself becomes a small fraction of total execution time.

Yeah unless I have something that requires really low latency or something I am taking ease of configuration every time.

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