Looking at Idera portfolio, I see Embracadero (Delphi developers for many years), Sencha (Ext.js), Assembla (was GutHub of Subversion era). So it seems like they buy companies and products that were big and very important among developersin the past, but not necessary leading the pack today.
I didn't think of Travis in that regard, though in a past few month I started to see Circle CI badges popping here and there for opensource repositories and anecdotally many internal projects at companies are moving to GitLab and their built-in CI offering.
Probably a good time to sell the company, though I'd prefer if they would find a better buyer.
That's exactly what they do, and the reason is that there is a long tail of subscription revenue that will continue to trickle in. They monetize that very well (for the owners)
Honestly, for enterprise users that is a good thing. In the hands of a company like Idera we can be reasonably confident that Travis will not disappear anytime soon. Under independent - or forbid Oracle / Google stewardship - that is far less certain.
This suggests that, at least from track record so far, for products in their portfolio one should not expect much more extensive development or innovation, they're just counting on the long-tail of revenue trickling in?
Yeah, I've been seeing lots of people switch to circle-ci or gitlab over the past year.
Not totally sure why. Travis does what I need and I know how to use it, and I don't particularly want to learn something new for CI myself, I just want to code!
Personally, I've seen growing stability issues. Builds are failing for no apparent reason and work fine after a manual restart. Circe CI was the next free service to try.
We usually use CircleCI at my company. I never realised how good I had it until I had to use Travis at my current project :)
To give an example: we have a monorepo and it's impossible to only run the tests of the project that has been updated. Even if you're ready to hack around with git. Even if you're ready to hack around with Travis internal functions. Because TRAVIS_COMMIT_RANGE is just broken.
And your argument "people switch to circle-ci, not sure why, Travis does what I need and I know how to use it" doesn't really make sense, other people would say that CircleCI does what they need and they know how to use it
I feel dirty for saying this but Azure Pipelines is the service that is tempting to me because of the power of its file format (variable substitution, conditionals, template tasks and steps).
The main reason why we moved to CircleCI was due to the rising test flakes and outages in TravisCI. Also, TravisCI comes with a lot of crap pre-installed which can be a pain sometimes. With CircleCI you can provide your own custom Docker image for running the build. If the build fails there is even an option to SSH into the build to debug. This issue has a lot of details on what it takes to migrate an open source project from Travis CI to CircleCI if you are interested.
https://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues/7748
I've chosen CircleCI over Travis for some projects because CircleCI is free for private repositories (to an extent). Travis is only free for open source, and is slightly more expensive for similar resources.
Of course that doesn't explain why open source projects would switch, but it could just be a mind share thing.
I've switched my personal projects, and my employer has switched to Circle over the past year. Circle's dockerized strategy for building up your CI/CD platform means that they support the new version of X nearly the day it comes out. Historically Travis has been very slow at this. Their support for Postgres 10 was an embarrassment (https://github.com/travis-ci/travis-ci/issues/8537). It's also vastly easier to parallelize your test suite. With Travis we had to install a third party gem to run our Rails' across many nodes. We also had to hand-manage balancing. With Circle we simply followed the docs, and we're off to the races.
I've actually seen (and need to do so myself) a few migrate to(or move even more into) Travis because they've added Windows builds. AFAIK they're the only hosted CI that offers Linux, Mac, AND Windows builders.
Azure Pipelines was the first one, and would probably have a better service overall if they had better documentation and supported more languages/environments.
FWIW, as someone in the process of trying to set up an Electron app to generate Linux / Mac / Windows builds on CI, I found Travis's Windows support to be unusably slow and flaky.
I hear Appveyor and Azure Pipelines are the two most usable Windows build systems; I'm quite happy on Appveyor.
Indeed - from the Azure Pipelines side of things, we started seeing a fair number of open source projects move some of their workloads over to us when we announced unlimited build minutes for open source projects. (I'm a PM for Azure DevOps.)
From my perspective, it's been interesting to see how people do. Some people bring all of their builds, of course, but some people split it up so that it's a mix of Azure Pipelines and Travis (or, of course, something else). Some people are bringing one or two platforms over - maybe they had Travis working as their build validation system, but it was doing Linux builds. So adding Windows builds with Azure Pipelines made sense. Or they wanted to do macOS or iOS builds, so they started building on our macOS build agents.
Anyway, I'm happy for Travis and I'm glad to see that they're excited about this acquisition. I can speak from first hand experience that running builds for open source projects takes a lot of resources. So I trust that this will help them make sure that they're in a position to continue helping out the open source projects and communities.
I prefer TravisCI to CircleCI, but I can get CircleCI on a private repo with their free plan. I honestly don't prefer CircleCI's UI/UX, it frequently is missing or caching info and I have to hard refresh the page to get things to work.
Circle CI has been steadily taking marketshare away from Travis for many, many years. And in my personal experience, mostly because of Travis' slow pace of improvement. Using containers for testing blows away performance on Travis for comparable tasks. Travis had made some improvements this last year to their workflows, configuration, and platform, but too little too late. My experience in dealing with their customer service (we did have a paid plan for some time) and customer feedback (feature requests, pleas for fixes, etc) was also quite poor.
I'd moved to Circle CI two years ago, and the only tasks/projects of mine still running on Travis are those which are deprecated, in suspended animation, or abandoned. For myself and my immediate peers, Travis is obsolete, and they did it to themselves. With Azure pipelines now a thing (and also far superior to Travis) I see another slow, slow death of a pioneering service.
> Travis is obsolete, and they did it to themselves.
This is sad, but the conclusion I have come to over the last 3-4 years as well. It was anybody's market 4 years ago, but through a sustained pace I think CircleCI have out-executed Travis consistently.
The thing I find interesting is that, looking at Semaphore CI who used to be far behind Travis, they are now biting at the heels of CircleCI with their 2.0 iteration. From what I understand they are not venture backed and are a smaller team, and yet their product is starting to look like a real competitor. To me this says that Travis just failed to execute well enough, rather than Circle having more money (although that helps).
Semaphore v1 has been great and very simple to use. Huge fan of those guys. Bootstrapped, extremely friendly, helpful and competent. We’ve been using them since 2012.
v2 definitely looks promising but they’re not sunsetting v1. Lots of respect for that as well.
Edit: at the risk of sounding like a fanboy (I guess I am), they also grandfathered us indefinitely on the same price plan we signed. Not many companies do that sadly.
Thanks for mentioning Semaphore, cofounder here. Yes, we’re 100% bootstrapped and in this for the long haul. It’s really all about execution. We built 2.0 in a timeframe in which we’d previously ship one or two features. Of course years of domain experience help, but everyone from Fred Brooks to DHH is right — adding more people won’t help build a better product faster.
I’ve had a similar experience. It seems like Travis rested on its past reputation for a long time and Circle slowly eroded their lead with a much better platform.
Circle was way ahead of Travis in their docker implementation. The Travis docker stuff always felt like a hack.
Once I started moving more projects to Circle, most of the developers on our team were much happier on Circle.
In case anyone from Circle CI reads here:
I haven't had the need for a hosted CI so far so this is all new to me. I looked at the Circle CI homepage and they have a video on the homepage "See how Circle CI works". Try watching that without sound. It's useless. I'm not sure why anyone would create a video like that.
This is another homepage that already assumes that everyone knows what it does and is no help to people unfamiliar with it.
While I agree with you that the homepage doesn't do a good job explaining what Circle CI is to someone unfamiliar with CI, your criticism of the video doesn't make much sense to me. The video has a voice-over explaining what Circle CI does, and includes subtitles for when you don't have sound.
I wonder if this kind of thing happens so often in software because we get fixated an idea of how a problem should be solved and lose sight of solving the problem. Better solutions that don't dovetail with our model of the world get discounted until the evidence is overwhelming.
Does Circle-CI offers Mac runner for public/open-source projects? This is the reason I haven't been able to migrate from Travis to Circle-CI for all my projects, I have an open-source Electron module that I need to test cross platform so Travis covers Linux and Mac and AppVeyor for Windows.
> Does Circle-CI offers Mac runner for public/open-source projects
Yes, but you have to ask them to enable the thing. I used them for ArchMac before I migrated to GitLab. I am contemplating moving back to GitHub and CircleCI, unless I can get my hand on some decent hardware again to run the CI builds.
On a tangent and just because these discussions almost never happen; Jfrog has been my most terrible support experience. We have an OSS and paid plan and I expect 4+ days before hearing back from them. If/when are repos experience an issue we would be dead in the water. I have even tried calling their emergency contact number with no answer or call-back.
Ouch, that's bad, shouldn't happen and usually doesn't happen. Ping me in DMs on Twitter (@jbaruch) or by email (jbaruch@jfrog.com) and I'll investigate what happened.
I've been worried about travis' lack of urgency in dealing with the fact that the existing travis-ci.org github hooks used for open source products are going to stop working in a week or two...
It would be really disastrous if the deadline were to be missed, but even if it goes smoothly in the end, how it's been handled does not inspire confidence. One documentation page still says "The migration was planned to start at the end of Q2 2018, but has been pushed back. We will announce a new date as soon as we are able." --https://docs.travis-ci.com/user/open-source-on-travis-ci-com...
Interesting. All I can tell from Idea's homepage is that it likes to acquire companies: https://www.ideracorp.com. It looks like it's just a private equity firm (or the acquiring arm of one, since it's owned by TA Associates).
I've never heard of any of the software in Idera's brand portfolio. I wonder what the cultural change is like internally at a company joining the umbrella of a private equity firm.
All my ex coworkers at Sencha have been "promoted" then immediately laid off after the acquisition (2-3 months). Their business model is to milk long term support contracts, I wouldn't expect Travis to be relevant anymore (if it was before).
Yeah, one of their "brands" is also called Idera, and I worked there for many years prior to the acquisition. But, yeah, just shortly prior to the acquisition, most of the dev group were let go to improve the bottom line, and a small group of 4 or 5 devs were kept and promoted to manage an outsourced team in some other country to continue developing the products. The atmosphere post acquisition was different, though, being at the company while it was growing, the culture also shifted as we grew from scrappy startup to "we are now in a high rise office tower" corporation.
And then from a high rise to a shitty office space where you could regularly see hookers on the elevators and at least while I was there the bank at the bottom was robbed at gun point twice.
My last job was for a small company making a APM tool. We were bought by Idera and they fairly quickly laid off nearly everyone.
We were cautiously optimistic when the purchase happened. Idera had just purchased a pair of similar applications with different target audiences, so we thought the products would stick around and there would be a lot of work to do integrating everything. We were right about that (they're all still separately available) but Idera didn't have us in mind to work on it.
Our PM went to Idera's offices and found that it was basically a sales centre and that all the development was outsourced. A week or so later they came and laid off a third of the company. Within 3 months of the purchase, the only employees left were our PM, 2 sales reps, and 2 support.
I can't speak to the software, but I don't like the chances of anyone employed by Travis.
Curious to what this means for the Berlin tech scene in general. Travis was certainly one of the trailblazers and a high visibility local startup (next to probably Soundcloud).
Yes, I have fond memories of hanging out in their offices above beta house. Amazingly welcoming bunch of people and one of the best things about the Berlin tech scene for me. Hope it works out well for them. I know they were never in it for the money but they deserve a decent payout for their years of commitment.
And with that I declare this product dead... Idera is the last stop to squeeze cash out of a company.
Expect layoffs and all future work to be outsourced via fixed cost development to lowest bidders (mostly in India). Also expect a big sales push for multi year contracts.
Nothing wrong with India, just that companies like Idea don't like to have developers on payroll, and the ones that do write specs all day long.
Lots of mention of CircleCI and Gitlab as the reason for Travis' downfall, which is very true. I also think GitHub announcing GitHub Actions[1] may have been the final nail in the coffin.
I think GitHub Actions will become a major force in the CI market in short order, it has so many things going for it
a) Everyone already has an account and lots of code already lives there. One less extra thing to worry about.
b) I trust MS/GitHub with my Cloud secrets more than I trust the various other CI providers.
c) The financial backing of MS to provide a significant free tier
d) The fact that actions can so easily be shared on GitHub is a killer feature. More are more projects/companies will build actions for their end users.
The first startup I was at was acquired by Idera. They started by trying to replace everyone in the dev team with remote contractors. I cashed out and left as soon as possible.
Readit News
I didn't think of Travis in that regard, though in a past few month I started to see Circle CI badges popping here and there for opensource repositories and anecdotally many internal projects at companies are moving to GitLab and their built-in CI offering.
Probably a good time to sell the company, though I'd prefer if they would find a better buyer.
Not totally sure why. Travis does what I need and I know how to use it, and I don't particularly want to learn something new for CI myself, I just want to code!
To give an example: we have a monorepo and it's impossible to only run the tests of the project that has been updated. Even if you're ready to hack around with git. Even if you're ready to hack around with Travis internal functions. Because TRAVIS_COMMIT_RANGE is just broken.
And your argument "people switch to circle-ci, not sure why, Travis does what I need and I know how to use it" doesn't really make sense, other people would say that CircleCI does what they need and they know how to use it
For one of my projects, I have TravisCI building release binaries for Windows, Linux, and macOS.
Of course that doesn't explain why open source projects would switch, but it could just be a mind share thing.
Here is example for Travis CI https://docs.knapsackpro.com/2018/how-to-run-travis-ci-paral...
And this is the graph showing the difference if you compare knapsack_pro dynamic tests split with what CircleCI does which is basically only time-based split. https://docs.knapsackpro.com/2018/improve-circleci-paralleli...
I hear Appveyor and Azure Pipelines are the two most usable Windows build systems; I'm quite happy on Appveyor.
From my perspective, it's been interesting to see how people do. Some people bring all of their builds, of course, but some people split it up so that it's a mix of Azure Pipelines and Travis (or, of course, something else). Some people are bringing one or two platforms over - maybe they had Travis working as their build validation system, but it was doing Linux builds. So adding Windows builds with Azure Pipelines made sense. Or they wanted to do macOS or iOS builds, so they started building on our macOS build agents.
Anyway, I'm happy for Travis and I'm glad to see that they're excited about this acquisition. I can speak from first hand experience that running builds for open source projects takes a lot of resources. So I trust that this will help them make sure that they're in a position to continue helping out the open source projects and communities.
GitLab vs CircleCI: https://about.gitlab.com/devops-tools/circle-ci-vs-gitlab.ht...
GitLab vs TravisCI: https://about.gitlab.com/devops-tools/travis-ci-vs-gitlab.ht...
I'd moved to Circle CI two years ago, and the only tasks/projects of mine still running on Travis are those which are deprecated, in suspended animation, or abandoned. For myself and my immediate peers, Travis is obsolete, and they did it to themselves. With Azure pipelines now a thing (and also far superior to Travis) I see another slow, slow death of a pioneering service.
This is sad, but the conclusion I have come to over the last 3-4 years as well. It was anybody's market 4 years ago, but through a sustained pace I think CircleCI have out-executed Travis consistently.
The thing I find interesting is that, looking at Semaphore CI who used to be far behind Travis, they are now biting at the heels of CircleCI with their 2.0 iteration. From what I understand they are not venture backed and are a smaller team, and yet their product is starting to look like a real competitor. To me this says that Travis just failed to execute well enough, rather than Circle having more money (although that helps).
v2 definitely looks promising but they’re not sunsetting v1. Lots of respect for that as well.
Edit: at the risk of sounding like a fanboy (I guess I am), they also grandfathered us indefinitely on the same price plan we signed. Not many companies do that sadly.
Circle was way ahead of Travis in their docker implementation. The Travis docker stuff always felt like a hack.
Once I started moving more projects to Circle, most of the developers on our team were much happier on Circle.
This is another homepage that already assumes that everyone knows what it does and is no help to people unfamiliar with it.
Yes, but you have to ask them to enable the thing. I used them for ArchMac before I migrated to GitLab. I am contemplating moving back to GitHub and CircleCI, unless I can get my hand on some decent hardware again to run the CI builds.
https://github.com/travis-ci/travis-ci/issues/9745
Now bought by a private equity firm, which usually doesn't indicate lots of innovation or an increase in quality on the way.
I wonder if I should be worried and start migrating my projects. I really liked travis for so long.
(Disclosure: Travis CI Employee)
The migration from GitHub hooks is actually just about complete. You can see the changelog entry here: https://changelog.travis-ci.com/migrating-from-github-servic...
Apologies for the lack of public updates on this!
Really kind of down to the wire though, eh?
It would be really disastrous if the deadline were to be missed, but even if it goes smoothly in the end, how it's been handled does not inspire confidence. One documentation page still says "The migration was planned to start at the end of Q2 2018, but has been pushed back. We will announce a new date as soon as we are able." --https://docs.travis-ci.com/user/open-source-on-travis-ci-com...
I've never heard of any of the software in Idera's brand portfolio. I wonder what the cultural change is like internally at a company joining the umbrella of a private equity firm.
We were cautiously optimistic when the purchase happened. Idera had just purchased a pair of similar applications with different target audiences, so we thought the products would stick around and there would be a lot of work to do integrating everything. We were right about that (they're all still separately available) but Idera didn't have us in mind to work on it.
Our PM went to Idera's offices and found that it was basically a sales centre and that all the development was outsourced. A week or so later they came and laid off a third of the company. Within 3 months of the purchase, the only employees left were our PM, 2 sales reps, and 2 support.
I can't speak to the software, but I don't like the chances of anyone employed by Travis.
https://www.ideracorp.com/brands
and
https://www.ideracorp.com/news
Expect layoffs and all future work to be outsourced via fixed cost development to lowest bidders (mostly in India). Also expect a big sales push for multi year contracts.
Nothing wrong with India, just that companies like Idea don't like to have developers on payroll, and the ones that do write specs all day long.I think GitHub Actions will become a major force in the CI market in short order, it has so many things going for it
a) Everyone already has an account and lots of code already lives there. One less extra thing to worry about.
b) I trust MS/GitHub with my Cloud secrets more than I trust the various other CI providers.
c) The financial backing of MS to provide a significant free tier
d) The fact that actions can so easily be shared on GitHub is a killer feature. More are more projects/companies will build actions for their end users.
1. https://github.com/features/actions