Of course, if you can just fence in your competition and charge admission, it'd be silly to invest time in building a superior product.
> Actions is down again, call Brent so he can fix it again...
Not sure if a Phoenix Project reference, but if it is, it's certainly in keeping with Github being as fragile as the company in the book!
The only self-hosted runners I've used have been for internalized deployments separate from the build or (pre)test processes.
Aside: I've come to rely on Deno heavily for a lot of my scripting needs since it lets me reference repository modules directly and not require a build/install step head of time... just write TypeScript and run.
When you've got many 100s of services managing these in actions yaml itself is no bueno. As you mentioned having the option to actually be able to run the CI/CD yourself is a must. Having to wait 5 minutes plus many commits just to test an action drains you very fast.
Granted we did end up making the CI so fast (~ 1 minute with dependency cache, ~4 minutes without), that we saw devs running their setup less and less on their personal workstations for development. Except when github actions went down... ;) We used Jenkins self-hosted before and it was far more stable, but a pain to maintain and understand.
Scheduling jobs, actually getting them running, is virtually instant with GitLab but it's slow AF for GitHub for no discernable reason.
After 10-ish hours the cluster was operational. The remaining 18 (plus 30-something unbillable to satisfy my conscience) were spent trying and failing to diagnose an issue which is still unsolved to this day[1].
[1]: https://github.com/actions/runner-container-hooks/issues/113
Using GitHub actions to coordinate the Valhalla builds was a nice-to-have, but this is a deal-breaker for my pull request workflows.
A lot of it is wasted in build time though, due to a lack of appropriate caching facilities with GitHub actions.
[0] https://github.com/Barre/ZeroFS/tree/main/.github/workflows
tl;dr uses a local slot-based cache that is pre-warmed after every merge to main, taking Sidecar builds from ~10-15 minutes to <60 seconds.
SlateDB, the lower layer, already does DST as well as fault injection though.
``` on: push ```
is the event trigger to act on every push.
You'll waste a lot of CI on building everything in my opinion, I only really care about the pull request.
I’m definitely sure it’s saving me more than $140 a month to have CI/CD running and I’m also sure I’d never break even on the opportunity cost of having someone write or set one up internally if someone else’s works - and this is the key - just as well.
But investment in CI/CD is investing in future velocity. The hours invested are paid for by hours saved. So if the outcome is brittle and requires oversight that savings drops or disappears.
I’m also someone who paid for JetBrains when everyone still thought it wasn’t worth money to pay for a code editor. Though I guess that’s again now. And everyone is using an MS product instead.
This is like if Dropbox started charging you money for the files you have stored on your backup hard drives.
When CI and CD stop being flat and straightforward, they lose their power to make devs clean up their own messes. And that's one of the most important qualities of CI.
Most of your build should be under version control and I don't mean checked in yaml files to drive a CI tool.
In my experience gitlab always felt clunky and overly complicated on the back end, but for my needs local forgejo is better than the cloud options.
- github copilot PR reviews are subpar compared to what I've seen from other services: at least for our PRs they tend to be mostly an (expensive) grammar/spell-check
- given that it's github native you'd wish for a good integration with the platform but then when your org is behind a (github) IP whitelist things seem to break often
- network firewall for the agent doesn't seem to work properly
raised tickets for all these but given how well it works when it does, I might as well just migrate to another service
(People seem to object to this comment. I genuinely do not understand why.)
Perhaps that isn't most use of it; the big projects are really big.
Fundamentally, yes, what you run in a CI pipeline can run locally.
That's doesn't mean it should.
Because if we follow this line of thought, then datacenters are useless. Most people could perfectly host their services locally.
There are a rather lot of people who do argue that? Like, I actually agree that non-local CI is useful, but this is a poor argument for it.
I'm not aware of people arguing for self-hosting team or enterprise services.
Actions let you test things in multiple environments, to test them with credentials against resources devs don't have access to, to do additional things like deploys, managing version numbers, on and on
With CI, especially pull requests, you can leave longer running tests for github to take care of verifying. You can run periodic tests once a day like an hour long smoke test.
CI is guard rails against common failure modes which turn requiring everyone to follow an evolving script into something automatic nobody needs to think about much
... Is nobody in charge on the team?
Or is it not enough that devs adhere to a coding standard, work to APIs etc. but you expect them to follow a common process to get there (as opposed to what makes them individually most productive)?
> You can run periodic tests once a day like an hour long smoke test.
Which is great if you have multiple people expected to contribute on any given day. Quite a bit of development on GitHub, and in general, is not so... corporate.
I don't deny there are use cases for this sort of thing. But people on HN talking about "hosting things locally" seem to describe a culture utterly foreign to me. I don't, for example, use multiple computers throughout the house that I want to "sync". (I don't even use a smartphone.) I really feel strongly that most people in tech would be better served by questioning the existing complexity of their lives (and setups), than by questioning what they're missing out on.
>... Is nobody in charge on the team?
This isn't how things work. You save your "you MUST do these things" for special rare instructions. A complex series of checks for code format/lint/various tests... well that can all be automated away.
And you just don't get large groups of people all following the same series of steps several times a day, particularly when the steps change over time. It doesn't matter how "in charge" anybody is, neither the workplace nor an open source project are army boot camp. You won't get compliance and trying to enforce it will make everybody hate you and turn you into an asshole.
Automation makes our lives simpler and higher quality, particularly CI checks. They're such an easy win.
The runner software they provide is solid and I’ve never had an issue with it after administering self-hosted GitHub actions runners for 4 years. 100s of thousands of runners have taken jobs, done the work, destroyed themselves, and been replaced with clean runners, all without a single issue with the runners themselves.
Workflows on the other hand, they have problems. The whole design is a bit silly
been working to move all our workflows to self hosted, on demand ephemeral runners. was severely delayed to find out how slipshod the Actions Runner Service was, and had to redesign to handle out-of-order or plain missing webhook events. jobs would start running before a workflow_job event would be delivered
we've got it now that we can detect a GitHub Actions outage and let them know by opening a support ticket, before the status page updates
That’s not hard, the status page is updated manually, and they wait for support tickets to confirm an issue before they update the status page. (Users are a far better monitoring service than any automated product.)
Webhook deliveries do suffer sometimes, which sucks, but that’s not the fault of the Actions orchestration.
The one for azure devops is even worse though, pathetic.