GitHub Actions is slowly killing engineering teams
iankduncan.com
GitHub Actions is slowly killing engineering teams
1–10 of 219 posts
Re: GitHub Actions is slowly killing engineering teams
#2This is roughly how I feel about cloudformation. May we please have terraform back? Ansible, even?
Re: GitHub Actions is slowly killing engineering teams
#3[flagged]
Re: GitHub Actions is slowly killing engineering teams
#4[flagged]
This is by choice, no? In most cases I see stuff like this, it could've been a bash script. That said, the environments in different CI's are different so it won't be totally portable, but still applies.
Re: GitHub Actions is slowly killing engineering teams
#5All CI is just various levels of bullshit over a bash script anyway.
Re: GitHub Actions is slowly killing engineering teams
#6[flagged]
That's why I like Maven -- it's declarative and HARD to make non-trivial things. But it's super-easy to write your own module (using code) and make Maven call it.
Also, another point about build scripts and CI/CD -- you usually touch them rarely, and the rarer you touch something, the more verbose it should be. That's why there's zero sense in shortening build/CI/CD commands and invent some operators to make it "more concise" -- you'll have to remember the operator each time you touch it again (like next year).
Re: GitHub Actions is slowly killing engineering teams
#7[flagged]
This is an AI written comment (as admitted on the profile page).
Please keep HN comments for humans.
Re: GitHub Actions is slowly killing engineering teams
#8> If you’re a small team with a simple app and straightforward tests, it’s probably fine. I’m not going to tell you to rip it out.
> But if you’re running a real production system, if you have a monorepo, if your builds take more than five minutes, if you care about supply chain security, if you want to actually own your CI: look at Buildkite.
Goes in line with exactly what I said in 2020 [0] about GitHub vs Self-hosting. Not a big deal for individuals, but for large businesses it's a problem if you can push that critical change when your CI is down every week.
Re: GitHub Actions is slowly killing engineering teams
#9[flagged]
The cost of the one-line CI config is that you miss out on integrations with the infrastructure, GUI, etc. You can't command runners of different architectures, or save artifacts, or prompt the user to authorize a deploy, or register test results, or ingest secrets, or show separate logs for parallel tasks, or any number of other similar things.
The real answer here is to put hooks in task-running systems like Nix, Bazel, Docker Bake, CMake, and so on that permit them to expose this kind of status back to a supervising system in an agnostic way, and develop standardized calls for things like artifacts.
It's just... who would actually build this? On the task runner side, it's a chicken and egg issue, and for the platform owners, the lock-in is the point. The challenge is more political than technical.
Re: GitHub Actions is slowly killing engineering teams
#10I'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 projects, CircleCI was similarly like this back in the day.
This was a dead end. CI is not special. We realised as a community that in fact CI jobs were varied, that encoding knowledge of the web framework or even language into the CI system was a bad idea, and CI systems became _general workflow orchestrators_, with some logging and pass/fail UI slapped on top. This was a good thing!
I orchestrated a move off CircleCI 2 to GitHub Actions, precisely because CircleCI botched the migration from the specialist to generalist model, and we were unable to express a performant and correct CI system in their model at the time. We could express it with GHA.
GHA is not without its faults by any stretch, but... the log browser? So what, just download the file, at least the CI works. The YAML? So it's not-quite-yaml, they weren't the first or last to put additional semantics on a config format, all CI systems have idiosyncrasies. Plugins being Docker images? Maybe heavyweight, but honestly this isn't a bad UX.
What does matter? Owning your compute? Yeah! This is an important one, but you can do that on all the major CI systems, it's not a differentiator. Dynamic pipelines? That's really neat, and a good reason to pick Buildkite.
My takeaway from my experience with these platforms is that Actions is _pretty good_ in the ways that truly matter, and not a problem in most other ways. If I were starting a company I'd probably choose Buildkite, sure, but for my open source projects, Actions is good.