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FWIW, Circle CI offers the ability to SSH in to build nodes and free nodes for public projects

by Kudos 10y ago

fredley 10y ago
It's really well implemented too, it grabs authorised public keys from the github repo directly, so if you can push to the repo for the project, you can just ssh straight into the build machine. Magic.
gurgus 10y ago
Was looking for this comment! CircleCI is amazing. We use it and it seems to offer us everything we need in a very nice shiny box.
haldean 10y ago
...sort of. I eventually rage-quit Circle and set up a Jenkins cluster because of all of the heisenbugs we found on Circle. Builds would fail 5-10% of the time for totally unreproducible reasons (for example, pip install into a venv would fail with a permission error), and you can't SSH into a build that's already failed. We very rarely had problems with Jenkins builds, and when we did, we could go look at the environment it had run in and diagnose what went wrong. I love Jenkins and would absolutely choose it over a hosted solution. (We also went from paying $1k/mo to $0/mo, which is a very nice side effect)
- tzaman 10y ago
  > (We also went from paying $1k/mo to $0/mo, which is a very nice side effect) That's not entirely true, because someone had to set Jenkins up and has to maintain it, but once things are rolling, it hardly needs any input.
- pm90 10y ago
  Agree completely. I think new users are perhaps turned off by Jenkins due to its (deserved) reputation for ugly UI. But its very dependable, stable and reliable solution. And there are plugins for doing every conceivable thing. We have a job manager to store the config in CI, and its such a breeze to work with.
- switchbak 10y ago
  I had much the same experience. Their lack of (proper) caching support meant our already-slow build took 2.5 times as long as it should, not to mention over burdening the maven repos. By lack of proper caching - I mean reusing a volume (or similar). They do have an approach where they bundle up some files and throw them on S3, but that can actually take more time than re-downloading them. Not much of a cache - which is important for both Docker and large Java builds. Supposedly the v2 should fix that, but I've been waiting forever to get my beta invite. Swapping to Jenkins allowed me to choose faster hardware, and optimize our build a bit better. Trying to get Blue Ocean to work right, but to be honest it's a supreme PITA - there seem to be bugs/undocumented workarounds in the github authorization side. Once that's up though, it _ought_ to work better. Jenkins' usability issues are most of what's allowed these other products to become popular. Hopefully they'll focus on that a lot more, but past performance would suggest they won't. If I wasn't so lazy, I would pitch in myself :)

FWIW, Circle CI offers the ability to SSH in to build nodes and free nodes for public projects

by Kudos 10y ago

FWIW, Circle CI offers the ability to SSH in to build nodes and free nodes for public projects

It's really well implemented too, it grabs authorised public keys from the github repo directly, so if you can push to the repo for the project, you can just ssh straight into the build machine. Magic.

gurgus 10y ago

Was looking for this comment! CircleCI is amazing. We use it and it seems to offer us everything we need in a very nice shiny box.

haldean 10y ago

...sort of. I eventually rage-quit Circle and set up a Jenkins cluster because of all of the heisenbugs we found on Circle. Builds would fail 5-10% of the time for totally unreproducible reasons (for example, pip install into a venv would fail with a permission error), and you can't SSH into a build that's already failed. We very rarely had problems with Jenkins builds, and when we did, we could go look at the environment it had run in and diagnose what went wrong. I love Jenkins and would absolutely choose it over a hosted solution. (We also went from paying $1k/mo to $0/mo, which is a very nice side effect)

tzaman 10y ago
> (We also went from paying $1k/mo to $0/mo, which is a very nice side effect) That's not entirely true, because someone had to set Jenkins up and has to maintain it, but once things are rolling, it hardly needs any input.
pm90 10y ago
Agree completely. I think new users are perhaps turned off by Jenkins due to its (deserved) reputation for ugly UI. But its very dependable, stable and reliable solution. And there are plugins for doing every conceivable thing. We have a job manager to store the config in CI, and its such a breeze to work with.
switchbak 10y ago
I had much the same experience. Their lack of (proper) caching support meant our already-slow build took 2.5 times as long as it should, not to mention over burdening the maven repos. By lack of proper caching - I mean reusing a volume (or similar). They do have an approach where they bundle up some files and throw them on S3, but that can actually take more time than re-downloading them. Not much of a cache - which is important for both Docker and large Java builds. Supposedly the v2 should fix that, but I've been waiting forever to get my beta invite. Swapping to Jenkins allowed me to choose faster hardware, and optimize our build a bit better. Trying to get Blue Ocean to work right, but to be honest it's a supreme PITA - there seem to be bugs/undocumented workarounds in the github authorization side. Once that's up though, it _ought_ to work better. Jenkins' usability issues are most of what's allowed these other products to become popular. Hopefully they'll focus on that a lot more, but past performance would suggest they won't. If I wasn't so lazy, I would pitch in myself :)