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Comment by mixedbit | Hacker News Reader

An interesting things is that GitHub is an expensive service and my guess would be that MS makes good money on it. Our small company paid about 200+ USD monthly for GitHub, much larger cumulative cost than Windows licenses. My believe was that Windows is getting worse, because it is considered legacy business by MS in favor of new offerings such as GitHub subscriptions.

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Very many more people use Windows to GitHub.

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.

github value maybe as not apparent as other product

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

I was surprised to learn that Depot runners, which are much faster, are also much cheaper. Would highly recommend them for anyone trapped on GitHub.

Depot.dev is great.

Thank you! Really appreciate the support.

Yeah, but I have to set that up.

GitHub actions more or less just work for what most people need. If you have a complex setup, use a real CI/CD system.

Such as?

Jenkins is open source and very well documented.

GitHub Actions are really for just short scripts. Don't take your Miata off road.

Jenkins! For the love of god don’t listen to this.

Always open to learning, what's wrong with Jenkins?

It's a bit bloated, but it's free and works.

Fragile against upgrades, tons of unmaintained plugins, admin panel UX is a mess where you struggle to find the stuff your are looking for, half backed transition to nicer UI (Blue Ocean) that has been ongoing for years, too many ways to setup jobs and integrates with repos, poor resource management (disk space, CPU, RAM), sketchy security patterns inadvertently encouraged.

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.

Why is gha just for short scripts, out of interest?

It's just short on features.

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.

What features is it missing that you would like to see it implement?

LOL, I worked on the Jenkins project paid for three years. Even they use actions to build Jenkins.

https://github.com/jenkinsci/jenkins/tree/master/.github/wor...

death before Jenkins

I haven’t use depot but I’m pretty sure the setup is literally just switching out the runs-on value in your workflows

Thank you for the kind shout out! Always happy to see comments like this. If anyone is looking for a better GitHub or GitHub Actions experience, feel free to reach out anytime.

Blacksmith.sh has been great for us. Massively sped up tests and a huge improvement for Docker builds over both Actions and Google Cloud Build.

Only downside is they never got back to us about their startup discount.

hey there! blacksmith solutions engineer here :) love to hear we've helped speed up your tests and docker builds!!

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!

Thank you! We've loved it! Looks like you found me, thank you :)

What are Depot runners?

Founder of Depot here. We provide faster and more reliable GitHub Actions runners (as well as other build performance services) at half the cost of GitHub [0]

[0] https://depot.dev/

Ah got it, thanks. I thought there was another kind of GitHub runner (like their "large" runners) that I hadn't heard of.

Is there a write up on the security of actions or equivalent that explains how they are secure both with direct and transitive dependencies? If this applies to Depot.

The legacy business usually explains why there are no new features, only minor maintenance, it doesn't explain why there is a lot of investment into work that makes it worse

It's not really that expensive. GitHub Enterprise is like $21/month/user while GitLab Ultimate was $100/month/user the last time GitLab published prices. These days GitLab Ultimate is "contact us for pricing" while the cheaper GitLab Premium is $29/month/user.

I guess Bitbucket is cheaper but you'll lose the savings in your employees bitching about Bitbucket to each other on Slack.

When’s the last time you looked at or used Bitbucket?

Like a week ago? We’re currently migrating away from it as everyone hated it.

Do we work in the same company? That said, I really don't understand why everyone hates on Bitbucket. I really thought it was _fine_ from a user perspective. Now we're on GHE and I find it a sidegrade at best.

Now for the people who were operating Bitbucket, I'm sure it's a relief.

As a user, I found Bitbucket to be a lot harder when it comes to searching and browsing code. The Markdown formatting is also more limited for documentation and the lack of Mermaid support in Markdown documents was shocking to see considering how both of the primary competitors (GitHub and GitLab) have implemented it.

> My believe was that Windows is getting worse, because it is considered legacy business by MS in favor of new offerings such as GitHub subscriptions.

What if GH actions is considered legacy business in favour of LLMs?

I wouldn't be surprised if there isn't some plan to make all of GitHub's backend "legacy"

and switch everyone to the dumpster fire that is Azure DevOps

and if you thought GitHub Actions was bad...

IIRC Azure DevOps was the “dead one”, all new development only takes place on GitHub.

From my perspective, Azure Pipelines is largely the same as GitHub Actions. I abhor this concept of having abstract and opaque “tasks”.

There's direct evidence that GitHub Actions was the rewrite of Azure Pipelines that was originally planned to finish 5 years ago and got "stuck" (because all their resources moved to GitHub). For a while you could find 2020 roadmap repositories (on GitHub) for AzDO talking up a Pipelines rewrite bringing a lot more features (including better Docker alignment versus Pipelines' much more complex "runner skills") that instead showed up in the first version of GitHub Actions.

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".

> I wouldn't be surprised if there isn't some plan to make all of GitHub's backend "legacy"

> 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.

When Microsoft bought GitHub they cancelled GitHubs own early CI effort and rebranded the existing Azure DevOps as GitHub Actions.

The GitHub Actions runner source code is all dotnet. GitHub was a Ruby shop.

I believe the original GitHub Actions was in Go - it used HCL which was at that point only really implemented in Go. Quite the move backwards to switch to YAML.

github doesn't pay microsoft for the azure runners. that's why they came up with actions at all. microsoft gets streetcreds for stable runners, github could replace travis and appveyor.

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