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The new pricing model for Travis CI

blog.travis-ci.com

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Re: The new pricing model for Travis CI

#71

Post by dehrmann »

user5994461 wrote: post #67
jrockway wrote: post #8

I guess this is the same pricing model as CircleCI? I've always found "build minutes" to be a little bit of a vendor-favored pricing model. I really love wanting to do a release, and watching my CI provider take three minutes to pull down a 30MB docker image, or "npm install" running at dialup speeds. All while they're billing you per minute -- they make money by not investing in their infrastructure! I'd prefer to p…

For reference, travis CI was sold to an investment company some time ago. The strategy is 100% to not improve the infrastructure, fire all the developers to save costs, and milk money from existing customers for as long as possible. Travis bought out https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18978251 Staff laid off the next month https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19218036

Around that time and for that reason, I migrated all my personal projects to CircleCI. I did the same for my then employer's open source projects, but CircleCI was also a customer, so it was a pretty easy sell.

Re: The new pricing model for Travis CI

#72

Post by soamv »

danielheath wrote: post #13
jrockway wrote: post #8

I guess this is the same pricing model as CircleCI? I've always found "build minutes" to be a little bit of a vendor-favored pricing model. I really love wanting to do a release, and watching my CI provider take three minutes to pull down a 30MB docker image, or "npm install" running at dialup speeds. All while they're billing you per minute -- they make money by not investing in their infrastructure! I'd prefer to p…

This is why I strongly prefer BYO-agents systems (github actions, buildkite, jenkins). I got our CI pipeline from 90 minutes to 10 minutes by running parts in parallel and applying lots more hardware. The cost is essentially nothing ($0.10 / build) compared to the time developers spend waiting. I currently use & recommend buildkite because they offer a preconfigured cloudflare template that does all of the hard parts…

Wait how is github actions a BYO-agent system? I thought you can only run actions on github's infra?

Re: The new pricing model for Travis CI

#73

Post by arximboldi »

Travis "free drugs" mode worked for a while. I got used to it via my open-source projects and ended up having a couple of clients pay for it for some of my commercial work.

Since their acquisition they have just been going downhill. I've been planning to move all my projects to Github Actions for a while. This is the "drop that overlfows the glass" as we say in Spanish, I'm putting everything aside tomorrow to migrate all my public and private projects to Github Actions.

Re: The new pricing model for Travis CI

#75

Post by rurban »

xvilka wrote: post #28
benatkin wrote: post #12

It seems GitLab CI/CD is beating Travis CI on pretty much every metric now, except the weirdness of only using GitLab for CI/CD and not code hosting, if you prefer to use GitHub for that. Am I missing something? (GitLab supports using its CI/CD on a non-GitLab repo just fine, but it can cause some initial confusion.)

Travis CI has unique feature - support for ARMv8, PowerPC, and SystemZ build environments. GitHub doesn't have this multiplatform building environment.

You still can use that for free if you disable osx and not use too many parallel build jobs. I just removed all of the osx jobs from all my repos. Even a PR can trigger that new pricing model.

Re: The new pricing model for Travis CI

#76

Post by hamstercat »

soamv wrote: post #72
danielheath wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why I strongly prefer BYO-agents systems (github actions, buildkite, jenkins). I got our CI pipeline from 90 minutes to 10 minutes by running parts in parallel and applying lots more hardware. The cost is essentially nothing ($0.10 / build) compared to the time developers spend waiting. I currently use & recommend buildkite because they offer a preconfigured cloudflare template that does all of the hard parts…

Wait how is github actions a BYO-agent system? I thought you can only run actions on github's infra?

They can run on github's infra, but you can host your own agent as well.

https://docs.github.com/en/free-pro-team@latest/actions/host...

Re: The new pricing model for Travis CI

#77

Post by jlgaddis »

PaywallBuster wrote: post #27
benatkin wrote: post #12

It seems GitLab CI/CD is beating Travis CI on pretty much every metric now, except the weirdness of only using GitLab for CI/CD and not code hosting, if you prefer to use GitHub for that. Am I missing something? (GitLab supports using its CI/CD on a non-GitLab repo just fine, but it can cause some initial confusion.)

External Gitlab CI is funny because requires you to replicate the repo to their side and then glue everything together (build status, PRs, etc) by yourself Then they moved the repository replication to the paid plan (20$/month/user). For a simple 10 person team, that's 200$ a month. Exclusively to get access to repository replication !! I have my own runners, so there's no reason to pay for the paid plan. I just end…

> Then they moved the repository replication to the paid plan (20$/month/user).

It looks like "pull" replication is available on the $4/mo. plan, per their documentation.

Re: The new pricing model for Travis CI

#78

Post by sytse »

clashmeifyoucan wrote: post #42
softinio wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like Gitlab and I tried them for a year before moving off of their CI couple of years back. Main reason was their CI was slow and had some reliability problems at the time. Hopefully they have resolved those by now as I would like to see more adoption of their service for sure. Will give them another shot soon :-)

I recently found a comparison¹ which was interesting. Of course, it's gitlab's so take that as you will. [1] https://about.gitlab.com/devops-tools/github-vs-gitlab/#comp...

Deeplink to the GitHub Actions vs. GitLab CI part of the decision kit https://about.gitlab.com/devops-tools/github-vs-gitlab/ci-mi...

Re: The new pricing model for Travis CI

#79

Post by glacials »

jrockway wrote: post #8

I guess this is the same pricing model as CircleCI? I've always found "build minutes" to be a little bit of a vendor-favored pricing model. I really love wanting to do a release, and watching my CI provider take three minutes to pull down a 30MB docker image, or "npm install" running at dialup speeds. All while they're billing you per minute -- they make money by not investing in their infrastructure! I'd prefer to p…

As an example of what the opposite pricing model looks like, YourBase[1] charges a flat fee per build such that it's in their best interest to make builds as fast as possible. Because of this forcing function, builds are instrumented and cached down to the system call level deterministically, based on file changes. It's amazing what economic incentive can do. (disclaimer: I work at YourBase)

[1]: https://yourbase.io

Re: The new pricing model for Travis CI

#80

Post by Arnavion »

hamstercat wrote: post #76
soamv wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait how is github actions a BYO-agent system? I thought you can only run actions on github's infra?

They can run on github's infra, but you can host your own agent as well. https://docs.github.com/en/free-pro-team@latest/actions/host...

... though github.com is still involved in the round-trip. That is, if your self-hosted agent agent has to run a workflow in response to a push event, the event still has to come from GH's servers, because GH is still doing the job scheduling. The agent doesn't monitor for pushes itself, and the whole communication channel is specific to GH so you can't swap in another provider.
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