Travis CI acquired by Idera • Hacker News Board

Re: Travis CI acquired by Idera

#121

Post by cheez » Thu, Jan 24, 2019, 1:19 PM UTC

jrochkind1 wrote: post #10

cheez wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's exactly what they do, and the reason is that there is a long tail of subscription revenue that will continue to trickle in. They monetize that very well (for the owners)

This suggests that, at least from track record so far, for products in their portfolio one should not expect much more extensive development or innovation, they're just counting on the long-tail of revenue trickling in?

This is not true. They make strategic investments to keep their products relevant. They are not making the next Google/Amazon/Apple, just running a business effectively.

Re: Travis CI acquired by Idera

#122

Post by jrochkind1 » Thu, Jan 24, 2019, 2:32 PM UTC

DrTorte wrote: post #118

jrochkind1 wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks! Good to know. Really kind of down to the wire though, eh? It would be really disastrous if the deadline were to be missed, but even if it goes smoothly in the end, how it's been handled does not inspire confidence. One documentation page still says "The migration was planned to start at the end of Q2 2018, but has been pushed back. We will announce a new date as soon as we are able." -- https://docs.travis-ci…

It's definitely not ideal, but it is less dangerous and close-to-the-wire than it sounds. It's actually separate from the migration to .com - which is something we haven't been great at communicating, and after talking it over yesterday, we're going to post something to clarify it a bit further. (Even working here, I was personally rather confused about it, and was running around yesterday chasing people down for ans…

Oh I see.

Yes, I thought the two migrations were the same thing. I think maybe y'all thought they were too until recently when you realized you weren't gonna get it done in time?

After all, if the migration to .com really _had_ started in Q2 2018, it probably would have been done long before Github Services went away, and you wouldn't have had to fix .org like you do now. Maybe that's what travis was assuming originally... if at some point that changed, it wasn't communicated clearly, as you acknowledge.

I also was thinking in terms of "the GH api that .org uses that's going away", and "the GH api that .com uses that isn't." I didn't realize there are actually THREE separate GH integration APIs involved? "Github Services", which .org used to use, and is going away. "Github Webhooks" which .org will use soon. And "Github App", which .com uses?

It's all very confusing.

But that's why it's incumbent on y'all to explain it. When we get a warning from Github some ~8 months ago that travis is using deprecated API's that will go away on Jan 31st, and travis is unable to tell us anything much about the schedule or plan for doing something about that until Jan 20th, and it's still pretty vague... that's either a failure of planning or failure of communication or both on travis' part. None of us, your customers, would wait until the week before drop-dead to remove a deprecated dependency in production software when we had 8 months notice... unless we were in some kind of crisis.

On Jan 31st we will see if travis.org hosted projects keep working without interruption...

(I also don't understand why I can't _choose_ to migrate my app from .org to .com at any time. _Some_ of my peers _have_ migrated their apps, with self-service web UI, but my projects it won't let me. NEW open source projects can be on .com for free. But my existing ones on .org are stuck there waiting on nobody knows what, I don't think I can even delete the project and create it anew on .com... If I'm explaining this unclearly, yes, right, exactly! I know I don't even understand what's going on, and don't want to have to, I just want it to work!

Anyway, I'm not blaming you personally, but trying to give you a flavor of one part of leading to loss of confidence in travis, which I historically have loved, for me personally. And part of that is I used to consider travis _really good_ at communicating what was going on, which as we all know is something developer-customers often value.)

Re: Travis CI acquired by Idera

#123

Post by superqd » Thu, Jan 24, 2019, 3:41 PM UTC

mbrumlow wrote: post #103

superqd wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, one of their "brands" is also called Idera, and I worked there for many years prior to the acquisition. But, yeah, just shortly prior to the acquisition, most of the dev group were let go to improve the bottom line, and a small group of 4 or 5 devs were kept and promoted to manage an outsourced team in some other country to continue developing the products. The atmosphere post acquisition was different, though,…

And then from a high rise to a shitty office space where you could regularly see hookers on the elevators and at least while I was there the bank at the bottom was robbed at gun point twice.

Sounds so exciting! :^)

Re: Travis CI acquired by Idera

#124

Post by DrTorte » Thu, Jan 24, 2019, 4:15 PM UTC

ivan4th wrote: post #44

DrTorte wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(Disclosure: Travis CI Employee) We can do it on .org as well! Just need to reach out to us via email to enable it (as well as the instructions, as it requires a manual API call rather than a UI Button.) And, as Involans also mentioned, we are merging the two together. support@travis-ci.com And we'll set you right up with debug mode. :)

There used to be a catch, though, don't know if it's already fixed. If you use this ssh debugging feature you make your secrets world-accessible (anyone can connect to ssh and grab them). This was one of the reasons why I switched to CicleCI, actually (besides their Workflows).

Yes, it is indeed correct that if somebody grabs the ssh command with the key while you are debugging, it is accessible. It's something that we want to address in a better way, but other priorities are present right now (build image updates, performance improvements, some new features that we haven't announced yet.) Still, the feedback is appreciated!

Re: Travis CI acquired by Idera

#125

Post by talawahtech » Thu, Jan 24, 2019, 5:45 PM UTC

Lots of mention of CircleCI and Gitlab as the reason for Travis' downfall, which is very true. I also think GitHub announcing GitHub Actions[1] may have been the final nail in the coffin.

I think GitHub Actions will become a major force in the CI market in short order, it has so many things going for it

a) Everyone already has an account and lots of code already lives there. One less extra thing to worry about.

b) I trust MS/GitHub with my Cloud secrets more than I trust the various other CI providers.

c) The financial backing of MS to provide a significant free tier

d) The fact that actions can so easily be shared on GitHub is a killer feature. More are more projects/companies will build actions for their end users.

1. https://github.com/features/actions

Re: Travis CI acquired by Idera

#126

Post by emilycook » Thu, Jan 24, 2019, 6:31 PM UTC

floofy222 wrote: post #117

andrewl-hn wrote: post #3

Looking at Idera portfolio, I see Embracadero (Delphi developers for many years), Sencha (Ext.js), Assembla (was GutHub of Subversion era). So it seems like they buy companies and products that were big and very important among developersin the past, but not necessary leading the pack today. I didn't think of Travis in that regard, though in a past few month I started to see Circle CI badges popping here and there fo…

Is there a good read somewhere about Travis CI vs Circle CI vs gitlab ?

Disclaimer, I am a GitLab employee, but we have some docs on this that you can find here:

GitLab vs CircleCI: https://about.gitlab.com/devops-tools/circle-ci-vs-gitlab.ht...

GitLab vs TravisCI: https://about.gitlab.com/devops-tools/travis-ci-vs-gitlab.ht...

Re: Travis CI acquired by Idera

#127

Post by obfk » Thu, Jan 24, 2019, 7:42 PM UTC

ArturT wrote: post #98

jherdman wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've switched my personal projects, and my employer has switched to Circle over the past year. Circle's dockerized strategy for building up your CI/CD platform means that they support the new version of X nearly the day it comes out. Historically Travis has been very slow at this. Their support for Postgres 10 was an embarrassment ( https://github.com/travis-ci/travis-ci/issues/8537 ). It's also vastly easier to para…

I work on knapsack gem to split tests across parallel CI nodes. To do optimal balancing I developed a dynamic test suite split with Queue approach. Here is example for Travis CI https://docs.knapsackpro.com/2018/how-to-run-travis-ci-paral... And this is the graph showing the difference if you compare knapsack_pro dynamic tests split with what CircleCI does which is basically only time-based split. https://docs.knapsa…

+1 for Knapsack. It's cumulative savings for our CI/CD has been tremendous.

Re: Travis CI acquired by Idera

#128

Post by obfk » Thu, Jan 24, 2019, 7:46 PM UTC

markonen wrote: post #86

freedomben wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW, I'm currently using Circle for several builds, and am actually looking at alternatives now. The web interface has been falling over (which is highly disruptive to developers when they can't look at build results and trigger deploys, etc). Circle has some nice features (especially easy artifacting and splitting rspec tests based on historic run-time) but it's not enough to overcome the lost momentum and producti…

At my company we've just finished migrating our Android builds from CircleCI to Buildkite (we did the iOS migration in December). I've been very happy with Buildkite so far. The web interface fits my mental model of how things should work much better than CircleCI's ever did. Our primary reason for switching was CircleCI's unpredictable and high costs on the iOS side (per minute billing combined with slow builds -> m…

Buildkite is a dream. Their technology is spot on, and it's changed the way we develop/integrate/release.

Re: Travis CI acquired by Idera

#129

Post by mnutt » Fri, Jan 25, 2019, 2:14 AM UTC

williamdclt wrote: post #93

mnutt wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We also use travis + a monorepo and yeah TRAVIS_COMMIT_RANGE is broken. We end up just tagging successful master builds and generating our commit range off of that. But yeah, so much of it is flaky, and the pricing is noncompetitive. Our current iteration has travis's docker client tunneling to an ec2-based docker server; it's both cheaper and faster and will hopefully make it easier to rip out Travis in the future.

Not a bad idea but travis only does a shallow clone, do you unshallow it? Doing a `git fetch --unshallow` was slow, and hanging forever about one time out of 5 when I tried a few weeks back

Yeah, in this case we did though I can see a lot of instances where the benefits don’t outweigh the costs.

Re: Travis CI acquired by Idera

#130

Post by amcintosh16 » Sat, Jan 26, 2019, 1:55 PM UTC

throwawaymath wrote: post #2

Interesting. All I can tell from Idea's homepage is that it likes to acquire companies: https://www.ideracorp.com . It looks like it's just a private equity firm (or the acquiring arm of one, since it's owned by TA Associates). I've never heard of any of the software in Idera's brand portfolio. I wonder what the cultural change is like internally at a company joining the umbrella of a private equity firm.

My last job was for a small company making a APM tool. We were bought by Idera and they fairly quickly laid off nearly everyone.

We were cautiously optimistic when the purchase happened. Idera had just purchased a pair of similar applications with different target audiences, so we thought the products would stick around and there would be a lot of work to do integrating everything. We were right about that (they're all still separately available) but Idera didn't have us in mind to work on it.

Our PM went to Idera's offices and found that it was basically a sales centre and that all the development was outsourced. A week or so later they came and laid off a third of the company. Within 3 months of the purchase, the only employees left were our PM, 2 sales reps, and 2 support.

I can't speak to the software, but I don't like the chances of anyone employed by Travis.