Plug: after almost a full year of hosting alone (for $50) I recently started using srht's builds, somewhat equivalent to github actions. It's been awesome so far. Look at the downloadable coverage.html: super easy to set up!
All the time. It’s not even that reliable when it’s up. Total embarrassment for us when we have to explain to management.
If I started again I’d probably use something standalone, light weight and 100% self hosted ie GoCD. I’d change the operating model to keep GitHub as a collaboration place but not have any dependencies on it for pipeline. We have other issues as well like the GitHub flow mod being inadequate for maintaining stability on high traffic repos too. I’d pull from master into a production branch and run that off line entirely.
I'm assuming that the fundamental flaws* of GoCD haven't been fixed, based on the knowledge that in 2015 they (ThoughtWorks) still hadn't addressed them, and I think 5-6 years isn't long enough for them to be addressed.
*Pipelines, as modeled in GoCD, were so inflexible that any kind of flow resulted in having many, many, pipelines configured. To the point that the number pipelines you operate and maintain is actually the multiple of any fork in logic you need.
From what I heard it was fine until Microsoft bought it and decided to bring over .net code (and people) from azure devops to replace a bunch of the pre-existing github actions stuff for some reason.
Very rarely, and (so far) not in any meaningful way. Having to wait a few hours for a CI process isn't a problem 99% of the time. Deploys are affected by issues on AWS and Azure far more often than GH in my experience.
I'd probably change my mind if I ever get unlucky enough to need to deploy a critical hotfix at the same time GH is unavailable though.
If you're OK with waiting multiple hours for CI, I suppose these issues wouldn't affect you very much. Where I work we make relatively small PRs and deploy to production tens of times per day. The recent outages have been a nightmare for us.
I'd wager that there's more self-hosted CI's running code from self-hosted repositories than from GitHub (however you measure it: e.g., lines of code, build time, etc)
GitHub were pretty open about having issues with Bitcoin mining abusing the free compute available via Actions. I think it's an ongoing battle and one which is having a wider platform impact
Aren't these pretty heavy duty and any issue sticks very prominently ?
A ton of companies are using these tools literally 24/7, at most of my jobs Github/Gitlab being down meant most of us would just be spending half of our time faking working (rare are the people who could just do "offline" dev for half a day without any external input/output)
Just like every company, they sometimes have things break, push out code that doesn't behave as expected, hit limits on various services they weren't aware of, etc.
The complexity of technical systems is massive especially when they are constantly changing. It's not helped that these companies have high availability requirements and need to be online 100% of the time even when making updates.
I love github as a product but for the past months, issues are a weekly occurance, often multiple times a week, and always in the middle of the day (Europe).
Things like this make me want to have more free time to start my own paid CI service. I can likely start from a few languages I know and take it from there.
I wonder how hard it is to write your own CI/CD though? Anybody has thoughts on this?
If you Google around you’ll see a crap ton of companies trying to do this.
IMO the only “serious” threat to Jenkins are platform integrated services like Gitlab CI/CD, GitHub Actions, Google CloudBuild etc. Everybody else seems to continue to use Jenkins.
I'm not scared of competition, I'm mostly wondering how viable and profitable such a business would be. I happen to believe people would pay for good specialized CI (say, Elixir-only, Rust-only, Golang-only etc.) but you're also quite right that the real value-add seems to be in integration.
I would bet on it being related to their identity server. It seems to almost work in browser(s) where I was signed on - but in a new browser, it gives HTTP 500 after SSO.
Readit News
https://builds.sr.ht/~motiejus/job/517389
And unlike any megacorp, Drew is approachable. I recommend having a look at it for anyone re-evaluating their software forge.
If I started again I’d probably use something standalone, light weight and 100% self hosted ie GoCD. I’d change the operating model to keep GitHub as a collaboration place but not have any dependencies on it for pipeline. We have other issues as well like the GitHub flow mod being inadequate for maintaining stability on high traffic repos too. I’d pull from master into a production branch and run that off line entirely.
Don't. Just don't.
I'm assuming that the fundamental flaws* of GoCD haven't been fixed, based on the knowledge that in 2015 they (ThoughtWorks) still hadn't addressed them, and I think 5-6 years isn't long enough for them to be addressed.
*Pipelines, as modeled in GoCD, were so inflexible that any kind of flow resulted in having many, many, pipelines configured. To the point that the number pipelines you operate and maintain is actually the multiple of any fork in logic you need.
I'd probably change my mind if I ever get unlucky enough to need to deploy a critical hotfix at the same time GH is unavailable though.
I'd wager that there's more self-hosted CI's running code from self-hosted repositories than from GitHub (however you measure it: e.g., lines of code, build time, etc)
Looks like some code issue from their side.
A ton of companies are using these tools literally 24/7, at most of my jobs Github/Gitlab being down meant most of us would just be spending half of our time faking working (rare are the people who could just do "offline" dev for half a day without any external input/output)
Slack could be down it had less impact overall.
[1] https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Distributed-Git-Distributed-W...
The complexity of technical systems is massive especially when they are constantly changing. It's not helped that these companies have high availability requirements and need to be online 100% of the time even when making updates.
Makes me want to do embedded programming.
https://status.azure.com/en-us/status
I wonder how hard it is to write your own CI/CD though? Anybody has thoughts on this?
It has a steep learning curve, as with any sufficiently advanced system.
[1] https://buildbot.net/ [2] https://john.scummvm.org
IMO the only “serious” threat to Jenkins are platform integrated services like Gitlab CI/CD, GitHub Actions, Google CloudBuild etc. Everybody else seems to continue to use Jenkins.
I'm not scared of competition, I'm mostly wondering how viable and profitable such a business would be. I happen to believe people would pay for good specialized CI (say, Elixir-only, Rust-only, Golang-only etc.) but you're also quite right that the real value-add seems to be in integration.
Dead Comment