I agree with the gripes, but buildkite is not the answer
If I cannot fully self host an open source project, it is not a contender for my next ci system
GitHub Actions is slowly killing engineering teams
11–20 of 219 posts
Re: GitHub Actions is slowly killing engineering teams
#12Agreed with absolutely all of this. Really well written. Right now at work we're getting along fine with Actions + WarpBuild but if/when things start getting annoying I'm going to switch us over to Buildkite, which I've used before and greatly enjoyed.
Re: GitHub Actions is slowly killing engineering teams
#13I hope the author will check out RWX -- they say they've checked out most CI systems, but I don't think they've tried us out yet. We have everything they praise Buildkite for, except for managing your own compute (and that's coming, soon!). But we also built our own container execution model with CI specifically in mind. We've seen one too many Buildkite pipelines that have a 10 minute Docker build up front (!) and then have to pull a huge docker container across 40 parallel steps, and the overhead is enormous.
Re: GitHub Actions is slowly killing engineering teams
#14This is roughly how I feel about cloudformation. May we please have terraform back? Ansible, even?
I think cdk is the one to use nowadays. Infrastructure as real code.
Re: GitHub Actions is slowly killing engineering teams
#15I've used many of the CI systems that the author has here, and I've done a lot of CircleCI and GitHub Actions, and I don't come to quite the same conclusions. One caveat though, I haven't used Buildkite, which the author seems to recommend. Over the years CI tools have gone from specialist to generalist. Jenkins was originally very good at building Java projects and not much else, Travis had explicit steps for Rails…
Actions is many things. It’s an event dispatcher, an orchestrator, an execution engine and runtime, an artifact registry and caching system, a workflow modeler, a marketplace, and a secrets manager. And I didn’t even list all of the things Actions is. It’s better at some of those things and not others.
The systems I like to design that use GHA usually only use the good parts. GitHub is a fine events dispatcher, for instance, but a very bad workflow orchestrator. So delegate that to a system that is good at that instead
Re: GitHub Actions is slowly killing engineering teams
#16The internet makes me feel like the only person that doesn't mind Jenkins. Idk it just gets the job done ime.
Re: GitHub Actions is slowly killing engineering teams
#17Github being less and less reliable nowadays just makes this more true.
In the past week I have seen:
- actions/checkout inexplicably failing, sometimes succeeding on 3rd retry (of the built-in retry logic)
- release ci jobs scheduling _twice_, causing failures, because ofc the release already exists
- jobs just not scheduling. Sometimes for 40m.
I have been using it actively for a few years and putting aside everything the author is saying, just the base reliability is going downhill.
I guess zig was right. Too bad they missed builtkite, Codeberg hasn't been that reliable or fast in my experience.
Re: GitHub Actions is slowly killing engineering teams
#18Re: GitHub Actions is slowly killing engineering teams
#19> You’ve upgraded the engine but you’re still driving the car that catches fire when you turn on the radio.
And fixing the pyro-radio bug will bring other issues, for sure, so they won't because some's workflow will rely on the fact that turning on the radio sets the car on fire: https://xkcd.com/1172/
Re: GitHub Actions is slowly killing engineering teams
#20> But Everyone Uses It!
All of my customers are on bitbucket.
One of them does not even use a CI. We run tests locally and we deploy from a self hosted TeamCity instance. It's a Django app with server side HTML generation so the deploy is copying files to the server and a restart. We implemented a Capistrano alike system in bash and it's been working since before Covid. No problems.
The other one uses bitbucket pipelines to run tests after git pushes on the branches for preproduction and production and to deploy to those systems. They use Capistrano because it's a Rails app (with a Vue frontend.) For some reason the integration tests don't run reliably neither on the CI instances nor on Macs, so we run them only on my Linux laptop. It's been in production since 2021.
A customer I'm not working with anymore did use Travis and another one I don't remember. That also run a build on there because they were using Elixir with Phoenix, so we were creating a release and deploying it. No mere file copying. That was the most unpleasant deploy system of the bunch. A lot of wasted time from a push to a deploy.
In all of those cases logs are inevitably long but they don't crash the browser.