Gitlab reducing free tier CI/CD minutes from 2000 to 400 minutes • Hacker News Board

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

#91

Post by danielheath » Thu, Sep 03, 2020, 9:52 PM UTC

cornflake wrote: post #83

CI pricing (gitlab, github actions, circleci etc.) is all extortionate. When they price by 'user seat' (gitlab) or 'credit' (circleci), comparing pricing is like trying to pick a cell phone plan. AWS Code Build will always be an order of magnitude cheaper, it's just slightly harder to set up but it works very well. It's unclear how all these other services will ever compete with that. For example, to run a CI server…

The setup time isn’t cheap, though, and the UI is... confusing.

If you’re using a dedicated ec2 instance, most providers (gitlab, buildkite, github, etc) will let you connect it as an agent for free.

IMO using your own runner is a better way to go in general because the standard ones tend to be very underpowered and you can get much faster builds without spending much.

At that point different providers are largely competing on price and UX (imo Buildkite have the best developer UX and the time saved as a result is well worth the price).

(Not affiliated with buildkite other than as a user).

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

#92

Post by usr1106 » Thu, Sep 03, 2020, 10:01 PM UTC

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.

The link has already been provided. The runner is only an administrative process. It can be indeed put into a Docker container. The instructions are easy to follow, the image is built by gitlab and updated regularly. If you choose the alpine variant instead of latest it's much smaller. We have done that for 2+ years and not noted any limitations.

The runner will start jobs that do the real building (or whatever you have coded in your CI). Again you can choose to have jobs executed in docker containers. Also documented by gitlab, easy to set up. Of course you need to provide a suitable Docker image where your build can work. Nobody can do that for you. In simple cases you can pull something existing from Docker hub without further additions.

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

#93

Post by jrochkind1 » Thu, Sep 03, 2020, 10:27 PM UTC

MayeulC wrote: post #84

deastman wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We define Pipeline minutes as the execution time for your pipelines. You bring up an interesting point, though. So today, for our Linux Runners on GitLab.com, those Runners are currently offered only on one machine type, Google Compute n1-standard-1 instances with 3.75GB of RAM. Our current Windows Runners on GitLab.com are Google Compute n1-standard-2 instances with 2 vCPUs and 7.5GB RAM. In the future, for Linux an…

> In the future, for Linux and Windows Runners, we will offer more GCP machine types. I can see free plan users starting to see their CI jobs randomly timeout if they have access to those machines. I get that execution time isn't a bad metric, all things considered. But I would have expected actual CPU `time` (1), maybe mixed with memory usage.

AWS or GCS charge for VMs in actual clock (wall) time though, right?

Tthat your load may spend more or less time waiting on IO instead of actually using the CPU... I would not expect to effect your charge. Which is the main difference between wall time and actual CPU time, right?

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

#94

Post by swyx » Thu, Sep 03, 2020, 10:28 PM UTC

marcosdumay wrote: post #77

etaioinshrdlu wrote: post #46

Are we in a "belt-tightening" cycle? Noticing that Docker and now Gitlab are reducing their super generous free tiers...

There is a global recession out there, of the kind that only happens once every 3 or 4 decades. Even if those companies aren't losing revenue (they probably are), there is less investment money too, so they are still impacted.

it isnt evenly distributed. usage of cloud services is UP if aws results are any indication. gitlab should experience a similar lift.

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

#95

Post by jrochkind1 » Thu, Sep 03, 2020, 10:31 PM UTC

One thing that always confuses me about the business factors in this kind of announcement, where they say that the vast majority of users won't be effected:

> We evaluted CI/CD minute usage and found that 98.5% of free users use 400 CI/CD minutes or less per month.

Okay, so just that 1.5% of free users, each using at most 1600 minutes more than the 400 under the new limits... is enough cost to actually matter and make it worth making this change?

Or they anticipated that number going up if they didn't make the change?

It seems odd to me to say "This hardly effects anyone at all, almost everyone can keep doing exactly what they are doing for the same price (free in this case)", AND "this was necessary for the sustainability of our budget."

What am I missing?

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

#96

Post by whoisjuan » Thu, Sep 03, 2020, 10:32 PM UTC

cornflake wrote: post #83

CI pricing (gitlab, github actions, circleci etc.) is all extortionate. When they price by 'user seat' (gitlab) or 'credit' (circleci), comparing pricing is like trying to pick a cell phone plan. AWS Code Build will always be an order of magnitude cheaper, it's just slightly harder to set up but it works very well. It's unclear how all these other services will ever compete with that. For example, to run a CI server…

You can install GitLab Runners on EC2. You can even GitLab install Runners on a Raspberry Pi or use some old computer and put it in a closet somewhere (uptime not guaranteed though).

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

#97

Post by aaronbrager » Thu, Sep 03, 2020, 10:37 PM UTC

This is cool, I love that gitlab lets you purchase extra minutes adhoc without a tier change. Neither GitHub nor CircleCi let you do that

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

#98

Post by lacker » Thu, Sep 03, 2020, 10:38 PM UTC

jrochkind1 wrote: post #95

One thing that always confuses me about the business factors in this kind of announcement, where they say that the vast majority of users won't be effected: > We evaluted CI/CD minute usage and found that 98.5% of free users use 400 CI/CD minutes or less per month. Okay, so just that 1.5% of free users, each using at most 1600 minutes more than the 400 under the new limits... is enough cost to actually matter and mak…

This sort of thing happens a lot when you first set up a free plan. Some part of it turns out to cost more money than you expected, and it’s a small but growing segment. If you’re going to have to pull back in it eventually, why wait? Waiting might just annoy twice as many people when you inevitably have to introduce stricter limits later.

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

#99

Post by stu2b50 » Thu, Sep 03, 2020, 10:46 PM UTC

chucky wrote: post #58

time0ut wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Is it? $15-30/head sounds like a lot, but these are employees you're paying 30k+ to in salary alone, if the addition of slack makes them 1% more efficient per month, that blows past the $15/head. Forget the tech companies with employees that easily crest 200-300k in costs after insurance and other benefits.

There's a lot of audits and regulation, in addition to tighter security, that Slack needs to prove to its enterprise customers that they can trust their employees blasting confidential information on it every day of every year.

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

#100

Post by nialv7 » Thu, Sep 03, 2020, 10:48 PM UTC

jrochkind1 wrote: post #95

One thing that always confuses me about the business factors in this kind of announcement, where they say that the vast majority of users won't be effected: > We evaluted CI/CD minute usage and found that 98.5% of free users use 400 CI/CD minutes or less per month. Okay, so just that 1.5% of free users, each using at most 1600 minutes more than the 400 under the new limits... is enough cost to actually matter and mak…

These are carefully constructed truthful statistic lies.

Of all the free users, how many of them even have a repository? Out of all the users who have a repository, how many of them actually make any use of CI/CD?

They are saying "1.5%" to make it sounds small, but those 1.5% could account for a significant portion of total minutes of CI/CD used.