What’s more, GitHub has basically stopped maintaining their own actions, pushing people to sketchy forks to do basic things. Their entire ecosystem is basically held up with duct tape and gets very little investment.
That isn't gonna get better anytime soon.
"GitHub Will Prioritize Migrating to Azure Over Feature Development" [1]
[1] https://thenewstack.io/github-will-prioritize-migrating-to-a...
Retrofitting that into "cloud" bullshit is such a bad idea.
Using bare-metal requires competent Unix admins, and Actions team is full of javascript clowns (see: decision to use dashes in environment variable; lack of any sort of shell quoting support in templates; keeping logs next to binaries in self-hosted runners). Perhaps they would be better off using infra someone else maintains.
> requires competent Unix admins
> Perhaps they would be better off using infra someone else maintains.
So does running VMs in a cloud provider.
Except now we call them "DevOps" or "SRE" and pay them 1.5-2x.
(as a former SRE myself, I'm not complaining).
We had a critical outage because they deprecated Windows 2019 agents a month earlier than scheduled. MS support had the gall to both blame us for not migrating sooner, and refuse to escalate for 36 hours!
The initial banners and warning emails about it went out well ahead of the original EOL timeline; and again as the extended EOL drew close.
If you were caught off guard by the brownout period, it's your devops team that's to blame, not Microsoft; and Microsoft was absolutely right to blame you for not migrating sooner. They gave you an extra 6 months to do it because you should have had all this done back in the first half of the year.
(If you want to blame Microsoft for anything here, blame them for not having a comprehensive tool to identify all your windows-2019 pipelines and instead just relying on "just go look at the latest pipeline runs page and hope everything's run recently enough to be on that".)
GitHub also runs a free tier with significant usage.
There are ~1.4b paid instances of Windows 10/11 desktop; and ~150m Monthly active accounts on GitHub, of which only a fraction are paid users.
Windows is generating something in the region of $30b/yr for MS, and GitHub is around $2b/yr.
MS have called out that Copilot is responsible for 40% of revenue growth in GitHub.
Windows isn't what developers buy, but it is what end users buy. There are a lot more end users than developers. Developers are also famously stingy. However, in both products the margin is in the new tech.
but github is pair well with MS other core product like Azure and VS/VSC department
MS has a good chance to have vertical integration on how software get written from scratch to production, if they can somehow bundle everything to all in one membership like Google one subs, I think they have a good chance
Only downside is they never got back to us about their startup discount.
could you shoot me your GH org so I can apply your startup discount? feel free to reach out to support@blacksmith.sh and I'll get back to you asap. thanks for using blacksmith!
GitHub actions more or less just work for what most people need. If you have a complex setup, use a real CI/CD system.
GitHub Actions are really for just short scripts. Don't take your Miata off road.
https://github.com/jenkinsci/jenkins/tree/master/.github/wor...
It's a bit bloated, but it's free and works.
This stuff is a nightmare to manage, and with large code bases/products, you need a dedicated "devops" just to babysit the thing and avoid it becoming a liability for your devs.
I'm actually looking forward our migration to GHEC from on-prem just because Github Actions, as shitty as they are, are far less of an headache than Jenkins.
I get the vibe it was never intended to seriously compete with real CI/CD systems.
But then people started using it as such, thus this thread is full of complaints.
I guess Bitbucket is cheaper but you'll lose the savings in your employees bitching about Bitbucket to each other on Slack.
Now for the people who were operating Bitbucket, I'm sure it's a relief.
What if GH actions is considered legacy business in favour of LLMs?
and switch everyone to the dumpster fire that is Azure DevOps
and if you thought GitHub Actions was bad...
The GitHub Actions runner source code is all dotnet. GitHub was a Ruby shop.
From my perspective, Azure Pipelines is largely the same as GitHub Actions. I abhor this concept of having abstract and opaque “tasks”.
Microsoft claims Azure DevOps still has a roadmap, but it's hard to imagine that the real roadmap isn't simply "Wait for more VPs in North Carolina to retire before finally killing the brand".
> and switch everyone to the dumpster fire that is Azure DevOps
The other way around. Azure DevOps is 1/2 a backend for Github these days. Github re-uses a lot of Azure Devops' infrastructure.
i.e. from https://github.com/actions/cache/?tab=readme-ov-file#note
Thank you for your interest in this GitHub repo, however, right now we are not taking contributions.
We continue to focus our resources on strategic areas that help our customers be successful while making developers' lives easier. While GitHub Actions remains a key part of this vision, we are allocating resources towards other areas of Actions and are not taking contributions to this repository at this time. The GitHub public roadmap is the best place to follow along for any updates on features we’re working on and what stage they’re in.They will occasionally make changes if it aligns with a new product effort driven from within the org.
Saying they're dropping support is a stretch esp as very few people actually pay for their Support package anyway..... (Yes they do offer it as a paid option to Enterprise customers)
> Instead of writing bespoke scripts that operate over GitHub using the GitHub API, you describe the desired behavior in plain language. This is converted into an executable GitHub Actions workflow that runs on GitHub using an agentic "engine" such as Claude Code or Open AI Codex. It's a GitHub Action, but the "source code" is natural language in a markdown file.
Edit: ok, looking at example it makes more sense. The idea is to run specific actions that are probably not well automated, like generating and keeping documentation up-to-date. I hope people don't use it to automate things like CI runs though.
(we run a private gitlab instance and a merge request can spawn hundreds of jobs, that's a lot of potential Gitlab credits)
Actions is one thing, but after all these years where the new finegrained access tokens aren't still supported across all the product endpoints (and the wack granularity) is more telling about their lack of investment in maintenance.
These include
- Gitlab
Open source:
- https://concourse-ci.org/ (discussed in the context of Radicle here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44658820 )
- Jenkins
-etc.
Anyone can complain as much as they want, but unless they put the money where their mouth is, it's just noise from lazy people.
How did we go in 20 years from holding these companies to account when they'd misbehave to acting as if they are poor damsels in distress whenever someone points out a flaw?
Honestly I think the problem is more a rosy view of the past versus any actual change in behavior. There have always been defenders of such companies.
They hired a ton of people on very very good salaries
You better thank god for MS for being lazy and incompetent, the last thing we want for big tech is being innovative and have a stronger monopoly
The opposite, to be lazy and to continue giving them money whilst being unhappy with what you get in return, would actually be more like defending the companies.
The opposite we see here: to not criticize them; to blame Microsoft's failure on the critics; and even to discourage any such criticism, are actually more like defending large companies.
This especially includes governments and other institutional buyers.
Their size or past misbehaviors shouldn't be relevant to this discussion. Bringing those up feels a bit like an ad hominem. Whether criticism is valid should depend entirely on how GitHub Actions actually works and how it compares to similar services.
If the past misbehaviours are exactly the same shape, there's not all that much point re-hashing the same discussion with the nouns renamed.
Here we are talking about one of the worlds most valuable companies that gets all sorts of perks, benefits and preferential treatment from various entities and governments on the globe and somehow we have to be grateful when they deliver garbage while milking the business they bought.
And besides that, a lot of people on here do pay for Github in the first place.
(I find it extremely sketchy from a competition law perspective that Microsoft, as the owner of npm, has implemented a policy banning npm publishers from publishing via competitors to GitHub Actions - a product that Microsoft also owns. But they have; that is the reality right now, whether it's legal or not.)
(It can also be extended to arbitrary third party IdPs, although the benefit of that is dependent on usage. But if you have another CI/CD provider that you’d like to integrate into PyPI, you should definitely flag it on the issue tracker.)
I used to work for a Japanese company, and one of their core philosophies was “Don’t complain, unless you have a solution.” In my experience, this did not always have optimal outcomes: https://littlegreenviper.com/problems-and-solutions/
So I’m part of the problem? Me specifically?
Just refuse to do my job because I think the tools suck?
I used Travis rather longer ago, it was not great. Circle was a massive step forward. I don't know if they have improved it since but it only felt useful for very simplistic workflows, as soon as you needed anything complex (including any software that didn't come out of the box) you were in a really awkward place.
For some examples of more advanced usecases take a look: https://circleci.com/blog/platform-toolkit/
Disclaimer: i work for CircleCI.
Also, honestly, I don't care about any of those features. The main thing I want is a CI system that is fast and customisable and that I don't have to spend a lot of time debugging. I think CircleCI is pretty decent in that regard (the "rerun with SSH" thing is way better than anything else I've seen) but it doesn't seem to be getting any better over time (e.g. caching is still very primitive and coarse-grained).
Once I'm encharged of budge decisions of my company I'll make sure that none will go to any MS and Atlassian product. Until then I'll keep complaining.
Github Actions is actually one of the better CI options out there, even if on an absolute scale it is still pretty bad.
As far as I can tell nobody has made a CI system that is actually good.
really surprised there are no others though. dagger.io was in the space but the level of complexity is an order of magnitude higher
Don't waste your time
What that type of section usually means is "there's someone from Microsoft that signed up for our service using his work account", sometimes it means "there's some tiny team within Microsoft that uses our product", but it very rarely (if ever) means "the entire company is completely reliant on our product".