Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Gitlab reducing free tier CI/CD minutes from 2000 to 400 minutes

about.gitlab.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 176 posts

Re: Gitlab reducing free tier CI/CD minutes from 2000 to 400 minutes

#51

Post by davnicwil »

nscalf wrote: post #39

For smaller projects who aren't ready to start spending yet, it's pretty trivial to spin up your own runners on a server. Not sure how it scales, but Gitlab has pretty solid guides on how to make one. It took me maybe an hour the last time I looked at it, worth checking out. Definitely easier to drop $10 than maintain that though, I'm a fan of Gitlab's CI/CD infrastructure.

This thing of spending like an hour setting up a runner is one of the things I wanted to address with https://boxci.dev - A CI service I’ve built with a similar bring your own runners model but where “setting up the runner” consists of just installing a package, literally done in seconds :-) You should check it out.

Re: Gitlab reducing free tier CI/CD minutes from 2000 to 400 minutes

#52

Post by time0ut »

vorpalhex wrote: post #17
bachmeier wrote: post #16

Their existing policy has never made sense to me. You can only give away so much stuff on a free plan. I don't think CI/CD is cheap. Buying extra minutes for $10 (not per month) is completely reasonable. At some point I feel uncomfortable using a free plan that is obviously unsustainable.

You can also run your own CI/CD runner for free and use their platform for coordination. I do this and it works well, as easy as running a docker image. Runs on my homelab.

This is the way to go. I've got a whole fleet of executors running on spot instances orchestrated by a runner on a t3.nano. Works great.

Re: Gitlab reducing free tier CI/CD minutes from 2000 to 400 minutes

#53

Post by acoard »

vorpalhex wrote: post #17
bachmeier wrote: post #16

Their existing policy has never made sense to me. You can only give away so much stuff on a free plan. I don't think CI/CD is cheap. Buying extra minutes for $10 (not per month) is completely reasonable. At some point I feel uncomfortable using a free plan that is obviously unsustainable.

You can also run your own CI/CD runner for free and use their platform for coordination. I do this and it works well, as easy as running a docker image. Runs on my homelab.

Can you share a bit more about this? I'm interested in setting this up myself. A link the docker image or name I can google?

To be clear, you store all your code on Gitlab's servers (i.e. not self-hosting git instance) but just "outsource" the CI/CD work to your homelab? That's my ideal.

Re: Gitlab reducing free tier CI/CD minutes from 2000 to 400 minutes

#55

Post by random_visitor »

zepolen wrote: post #49
sushshshsh wrote: post #5

Metering of services like this only makes sense for organizations that don't have the time or expertise or desire to maintain the open source, self-hosted version themselves. Raspi and similar devices will some day hopefully rid the world of this tyranny of having to trust a website like this and pay them for eternity and hope they dont go down and hope they dont raise prices (oops) and hope they dont obfuscate prici…

99$ for 50,000 hours is a steal. You could barely rent a dedicated server for that amount of money, let alone the maintenance.

> You could barely rent a dedicated server for that amount of money

You can get a Ryzen 5/64G for like $40/month on providers like hetzner. While I get your point about maintenance, it's not right to say that dedicated servers are that expensive (you also can't compare the performance of 2vCPU/4G with a dedi but that's beside the point)

Re: Gitlab reducing free tier CI/CD minutes from 2000 to 400 minutes

#56

Post by time0ut »

jchw wrote: post #40
vkgfx wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> At some point I feel uncomfortable using a free plan that is obviously unsustainable. This describes how I've felt about Discord for years.

You can pay for Discord. Admittedly, I do. It's not that Discord is perfect, I have a lot of personal gripes with it. But it's still significantly better than where I came from (Skype) and I use it a lot so it seems fair enough. Discord Nitro also thankfully pivoted from being a games service and the features it does provide are nice to have. (Larger file uploads, better stream quality, cross-server emoji.)

The pricing for this seems totally crazy to me. If I recall correctly, maxing out a server is like $160 a month, right?

Re: Gitlab reducing free tier CI/CD minutes from 2000 to 400 minutes

#57

Post by time0ut »

acoard wrote: post #53
vorpalhex wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can also run your own CI/CD runner for free and use their platform for coordination. I do this and it works well, as easy as running a docker image. Runs on my homelab.

Can you share a bit more about this? I'm interested in setting this up myself. A link the docker image or name I can google? To be clear, you store all your code on Gitlab's servers (i.e. not self-hosting git instance) but just "outsource" the CI/CD work to your homelab? That's my ideal.

You run an agent called the GitLab runner. You configure it with a token from your Gitlab.com group or repo (depending on where you want the runner to be available). You tag the runner and reference it by tagging CI jobs you want to run on it. The runner polls for outstanding jobs and then executes them. It is extremely flexible in how it does this. In our case, the runner manages a fleet of executors using docker+machine. I believe this is similar to how Gitlab does it internally.

See https://docs.gitlab.com/runner/

Re: Gitlab reducing free tier CI/CD minutes from 2000 to 400 minutes

#58

Post by chucky »

time0ut wrote: post #56
jchw wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can pay for Discord. Admittedly, I do. It's not that Discord is perfect, I have a lot of personal gripes with it. But it's still significantly better than where I came from (Skype) and I use it a lot so it seems fair enough. Discord Nitro also thankfully pivoted from being a games service and the features it does provide are nice to have. (Larger file uploads, better stream quality, cross-server emoji.)

The pricing for this seems totally crazy to me. If I recall correctly, maxing out a server is like $160 a month, right?

Compared to Slack, which sells you basically the same thing but with a "business" tag for $8 per person and month it doesn't seem like that much.

On the other hand Slack's pricing is pretty crazy.

Re: Gitlab reducing free tier CI/CD minutes from 2000 to 400 minutes

#60

Post by kevincox »

dmm wrote: post #24
rumanator wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Does anyone else think this is a Gitlab campaign against overuse of monomorphization in Rust projects? No,not really. I mean, in healthy projects build times are dwarfed by the time it takes to run tests. In web development projects even the delivery and deployment steps dwarf build times.

> in healthy projects build times are dwarfed by the time it takes to run tests I don't doubt that's often true but many Rust projects may be outliers here. A full, non-incremental build of a Rust project involves building all of its dependencies. This can add significant amounts of time if a project uses a big framework like Actix-web, which adds many dependencies. My tests however run very quickly, ~1ms each. So ru…

You should be caching the builds of your dependencies. This is very easy with cargo and GitLab. I think encouraging people to optimize this is a reasonable cost to push onto the free users.
Post reply on HN