I’m blowing through my 1000 mins in days.
Thinking to either pool some free tiers or figure something out with spot instances.
Also is it just me or is CI/CD tooling still sort of rough all around.
Hetzner has cheap VPS that I host my CI on. It costs like $10/month.
Pick the cheapest region, since CI runners location doesn’t matter much.
But I think the issue is that my situation (solo dev, mono repo) is just not right for a dedicated instance.
With only 1-2 runners, the pipeline is slow (low parallelism) and resource constrained. And at least 50% of the time its idle (I'm not working/sleeping).
I guess what I'm really looking for is for some kind of aggressive autoscaling, and aggressive caching.
I tried a couple of things (GHA, Dagger + Hertzner, Buildkite)
And Im just not too sure theres going to be any out of the box solution since my priority is essentially to minimize cost and maximize efficiency. Not really a great customer for any providers.
Im tempted to just get agent to build something out quickly with cloudflare workers + spot instances.
I also have some other nice to have requirements:
- ts/code over config
- locally runnable and testable
- preferably no lock in
- repeatable/reproducible
A buddy of mine runs his whole CICD setup off an old gaming desktop. They use tailscale to connect to their hosted infrastructure and set it up as a GitHub action runner.
For a solo dev this might be the way to go.
My wife uses my old gaming desktop for her ux design work as well.
And I was thinking of using the gpu to run some tts models.
Now to just figure out a way to run it all on windows and have it auto start when she logs in.
So what? its $10 a month. Why do you need to chase 100% utilization?
And use can use that to host your website, a game server, maybe some other projects...
https://docs.drone.io/server/provider/github/
Very easy to stand up, does just fine. Definitely doesn't have the "library" of prebuilt actions that GHA does, but for the most part... I consider that a plus.
Otherwise it's very similar in concept - define actions in a yaml file, run commands on an image, webhook integration with most repo providers.
I run it on some old hardware locally (k3s cluster on old machines) and it outperforms the 1000 minutes from GHA easily, and costs basically nothing but some maintenance and time.
I've been keeping my eyes open for something new in this space since Harness bought it, though - so if other folks have recommendations I'd be interested in alternatives.
Best decision we ever made