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Comment by samhh | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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 :)

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

Depot.dev is great.

Thank you! Really appreciate the support.

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.

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.

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