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Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions

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Re: Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions

#591

Post by Nextgrid »

embedding-shape wrote: post #517
Nextgrid wrote: post #514

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Takes like these do not account for the value you gained by using the software in the meantime. Here are 2 scenarios: 1) company uses exclusively free software, spends more time dealing with the shortcomings of said software than developing product, product is half baked and doesn't sell well, company dies. 2) company uses proprietary but cheap/free (as in beer) software that does the job really well, focuses on deve…

> A purist approach like in scenario 1 leaves everyone poor. That depends, not always. Sometimes the employees of said company manages to contribute back upstream, on the dime of the company. If the "free software" they used and contributed to have a lot of users, it's certainly not "leaves everyone poor" but rather "helps everyone, beyond monetary gain". Sure, you can make the argument that it isn't that great for t…

Even purely from an altruist perspective I’d argue scenario 2 makes more sense as the resulting money can be used to fund a lot more open-source contributions.

Re: Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions

#592

Post by novok »

crohr wrote: post #475
paulddraper wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GitHub Actions runners are hard to self-host. The runner configuration and registration process is unnecessarily byzantine. [1] They can't cancel jobs cleanly. [2] There are consistency problems everywhere. [3] Their own documentations describes horrible things unless you use runners in JIT mode. Though JIT runners are not always removed after exit. If there is a worse self-hosted CI runner, I haven't yet met it. [1]…

I am developing a self-hosted solution for this [1]. It’s true that it’s somewhat of a pain but JIT runners allow a lot of flexibility that we don’t find elsewhere. [1] https://runs-on.com

In my experience even with runs-on it is a bit painful with runner cancellations.

Re: Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions

#593

Post by Nextgrid »

bdangubic wrote: post #587
Nextgrid wrote: post #564

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's value in enforcing checks on the server side to avoid people accidentally/maliciously merging code that doesn't pass said checks. Checks can be linters, security scanners, etc.

why on the server?!

Because then you protect against a compromised/misbehaving developer workstation. No matter what the individual developer does, the server will prevent a PR being merged if it doesn’t pass the server-enforced checks.

Running builds on a designated server would also protect against malware on a developer’s machine silently embedding itself into the resulting artifact and then deployed to production.

Re: Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions

#594

Post by Retric »

Nextgrid wrote: post #591
embedding-shape wrote: post #517

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A purist approach like in scenario 1 leaves everyone poor. That depends, not always. Sometimes the employees of said company manages to contribute back upstream, on the dime of the company. If the "free software" they used and contributed to have a lot of users, it's certainly not "leaves everyone poor" but rather "helps everyone, beyond monetary gain". Sure, you can make the argument that it isn't that great for t…

Even purely from an altruist perspective I’d argue scenario 2 makes more sense as the resulting money can be used to fund a lot more open-source contributions.

Could in theory is very different from what actually happens.

In the end the purists approach results in better more productive software across even slightly longer timescales. That ultimately produces more value and thus a richer society than the kind of short term pump and dump schemes which SV is so fond of. Who captures that value is a different story than was that value created.

Re: Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions

#595

Post by novok »

jononor wrote: post #512
IshKebab wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's because there are easy-to-use third party runners that cost around 3-10x less than the GitHub ones. This is aimed squarely at them. https://github.com/neysofu/awesome-github-actions-runners

Starting an external CI company for GitHub is becoming more interesting now. Gitlab offers ability to do CI for external repositories. Travis CI was what everyone used before Github Actions. Time for a new Travis?

There are a few like buildkite

Re: Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions

#596

Post by gheltllck »

throwaway150 wrote: post #455

It is us, developers, who convinced our management to purchase GitHub Enterprise to be our forge. We didn't pay any heed to the values of software freedom. A closed source, proprietary software had good features. We saw that and convinced our management to purchase it. Never mind what cost it would impose in the future when the good software gets bad owners. Never mind that there were alternatives that were inferior…

Not to defend this behaviour, but a lot of clouds SaaS do require you to pay for both ”management” and for the actual resources. And if you’re using vms in their cloud, you pay twice.

For example, Azure has had a script runner service for ages that you can hook up to your ”own” vm, by installing an agent. But then you pay double, the fee (per second) for the service as long as the script is running, and the fee (per second) for the vm in azure as long as it exists. So, as with GitHub actions, it’s cheaper to run it on their provided crap instances.

To get rid of the double costs I guess you could install your own CI server and agents, that polls the GitHub repo, but then you don’t get the integration in their web gui. That was what you did before gh actions came around, a local Jenkins for example.

Re: Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions

#597

Post by heurist »

eduardogarza wrote: post #136

This is my first comment on HN despite being a user for over a decade -- this is one of the most outrageous pricing changes I've encountered - I couldn't believe it when I read the email earlier (I run self-hosted runners). Anyone using GitLab or any other VCM that you'd recommend? I'm absolutely done with Github. Or is everything else just as bad?

Have been using Gitlab happily for a decade, though I have never had to directly worry about the cost for larger teams.

Re: Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions

#598

Post by ghthor »

novok wrote: post #595
jononor wrote: post #512

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Starting an external CI company for GitHub is becoming more interesting now. Gitlab offers ability to do CI for external repositories. Travis CI was what everyone used before Github Actions. Time for a new Travis?

There are a few like buildkite

Buildkite is so dope; love them

Re: Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions

#599

Post by SturgeonsLaw »

duxup wrote: post #582
throwaway150 wrote: post #455

It is us, developers, who convinced our management to purchase GitHub Enterprise to be our forge. We didn't pay any heed to the values of software freedom. A closed source, proprietary software had good features. We saw that and convinced our management to purchase it. Never mind what cost it would impose in the future when the good software gets bad owners. Never mind that there were alternatives that were inferior…

It's not my money man. It's still fine.

That not-your-money is still going towards rewarding user-hostile decisions

Re: Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions

#600

Post by gheltllck »

paulddraper wrote: post #342
golovast wrote: post #131

I got contacted by our rep a couple weeks ago, who informed me of this news. I thought it was a disaster and it really pissed me off. The rep couldn't even explain the reasoning well. It basically summed up to "because we can" and "where are you going to go?". He was shocked to find out that I didn't like it. We currently self-host on kubernets/aws. The thing that really got to me isn't the new charge per se. It's th…

GitHub Actions runners are hard to self-host. The runner configuration and registration process is unnecessarily byzantine. [1] They can't cancel jobs cleanly. [2] There are consistency problems everywhere. [3] Their own documentations describes horrible things unless you use runners in JIT mode. Though JIT runners are not always removed after exit. If there is a worse self-hosted CI runner, I haven't yet met it. [1]…

And they are even on their third (fourth?) from-scratch rewrite of their agent server. When will they get it right? (Rhetorical question)
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