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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 the

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 for opensource repositories and anecdotally many internal projects at companies are moving to GitLab and their built-in CI offering. Probably a good time to sell the company, though I'd prefer if they would find a better buyer.

cheez 8y ago
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)
- jrochkind1 8y ago
  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?
  - zitterbewegung 8y ago
    Some products are feature complete and since they are looking at long term earnings they won’t sunset the project which are two big pluses .
  - swasheck 8y ago
    as a former customer of idera (and a customer of their competitors), even their core products don't really get much ongoing development attention. they _were_ quite good for what they were, when they were current. after a while, though, they do just become subscription streams.
  - cheez 8y ago
    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.
- dotancohen 8y ago
  Honestly, for enterprise users that is a good thing. In the hands of a company like Idera we can be reasonably confident that Travis will not disappear anytime soon. Under independent - or forbid Oracle / Google stewardship - that is far less certain.
  - kevin_b_er 8y ago
    Travis will likely slow rot under Idera, looking at how its owned by a private equity firm. This is better in some ways than getting Our Incredible Journey'd under someone like Google.
  - TheJimMcKeeth 8y ago
    As an employee of Embarcadero I can tell you they do invest in new development. Delphi has received a number of new features and updates since Idera aquired us. Could they invest more? You can always invest more, but it is important for the long term that the company and products continue, which Idera seems good at. * this is a comment from me personally and not an official company statement.
    - papasound 8y ago
      Do you think they will have enough money to fix gazillion of RIO bugs? Cause i have a feeling that Delphi is is getting out of tracks and nobody cares about it anymore? But i wish i am wrong since i like it very much.
      - TheJimMcKeeth 8y ago
        Kind of off topic to this discussion, but yes.
  - cheez 8y ago
    I completely agree. Not making a judgement on the model, it is what it is.
jrochkind1 8y ago
Yeah, I've been seeing lots of people switch to circle-ci or gitlab over the past year. Not totally sure why. Travis does what I need and I know how to use it, and I don't particularly want to learn something new for CI myself, I just want to code!
- strig 8y ago
  CircleCI has a free tier for private repos, same with Gitlab.
  - chucksmash 8y ago
    The private repo pricing was what drove me to try an alternative to Travis in the first place. The cheapest private repos plan is $70/mo now and, if memory serves, when I looked into it previously it was >$100/mo. Fine for startups I guess. For the use case of someone who wants a CI server that, say, runs tests on their Project Euler private repo it's a no-way-no-how price point. I assume they've thought this through and it's done purposefully. Still, side projects tools are a gateway to real project usage.
- radomir_cernoch 8y ago
  Personally, I've seen growing stability issues. Builds are failing for no apparent reason and work fine after a manual restart. Circe CI was the next free service to try.
  - freedomben 8y ago
    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 productivity of being unable to reach the web interface.
    - 8y ago
dschep 8y ago
I've actually seen (and need to do so myself) a few migrate to(or move even more into) Travis because they've added Windows builds. AFAIK they're the only hosted CI that offers Linux, Mac, AND Windows builders.
- iamed2 8y ago
  Azure Pipelines was the first one, and would probably have a better service overall if they had better documentation and supported more languages/environments.
  - tracker1 8y ago
    Azure DevOps (formerly VSTS) in general moves really quickly, relative to everyone else. At least it feels that way... the multiple names to search for (vsts, tfs, "azure devops") also makes it hard to find stuff in general searches. Often the results are prior versions, and it's still hard to figure out. I dread when I have to tweak things. I do appreciate the service(s) a lot though. Pipelines is one of the better CI/CD platforms I've ever used anywhere. It's just, like you said, sometimes hard wrt documentation.
  - jeremyepling 8y ago
    I’m a product manager on Azure Pipelines. Can you tell me more about what’s missing in the docs and language support to make it better. Email works as well jepling at microsoft dot com.
  - dschep 8y ago
    Ah, I'll have to check it out
- lazerwalker 8y ago
  FWIW, as someone in the process of trying to set up an Electron app to generate Linux / Mac / Windows builds on CI, I found Travis's Windows support to be unusably slow and flaky. I hear Appveyor and Azure Pipelines are the two most usable Windows build systems; I'm quite happy on Appveyor.
manigandham 8y ago
Looks like they bought Froala too, which is the best html editor we've used so far.
- dotancohen 8y ago
  What does the $144 Froalo offer that open source alternatives don't? Serious question. The Froalo site is not convincing at all.
  - manigandham 8y ago
    Have you tried the demo? It's incredibly feature-filled and acts like a real editor with drag/drop, content embeds, etc. while still producing clean HTML output. It's not as fancy as the abstracted editors that have their own non-DOM format structure but they usually are missing many other features. The pricing has increased and the hobby plan probably isn't worth it but the product itself is good if you need an editor.
jherdman 8y ago
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 https://github.com/travis-ci/travis-ci/issues/8537). It's also vastly easier to parallelize your test suite. With Travis we had to install a third party gem to run our Rails' across many nodes. We also had to hand-manage balancing. With Circle we simply followed the docs, and we're off to the races.
- ArturT 8y ago
  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-parallel-jobs-with-build-matrix-feature-fast 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.knapsackpro.com/2018/improve-circleci-parallelisation-for-rspec-minitest-cypress https://docs.knapsackpro.com/2018/improve-circleci-paralleli...
  - obfk 8y ago
    +1 for Knapsack. It's cumulative savings for our CI/CD has been tremendous.
Spartan-S63 8y ago
I've also, anecdotally, started seeing more Azure Pipelines badges on open source projects, too.
- ethomson 8y ago
  Indeed - from the Azure Pipelines side of things, we started seeing a fair number of open source projects move some of their workloads over to us when we announced unlimited build minutes for open source projects. (I'm a PM for Azure DevOps.) From my perspective, it's been interesting to see how people do. Some people bring all of their builds, of course, but some people split it up so that it's a mix of Azure Pipelines and Travis (or, of course, something else). Some people are bringing one or two platforms over - maybe they had Travis working as their build validation system, but it was doing Linux builds. So adding Windows builds with Azure Pipelines made sense. Or they wanted to do macOS or iOS builds, so they started building on our macOS build agents. Anyway, I'm happy for Travis and I'm glad to see that they're excited about this acquisition. I can speak from first hand experience that running builds for open source projects takes a lot of resources. So I trust that this will help them make sure that they're in a position to continue helping out the open source projects and communities.
audiolion 8y ago
I prefer TravisCI to CircleCI, but I can get CircleCI on a private repo with their free plan. I honestly don't prefer CircleCI's UI/UX, it frequently is missing or caching info and I have to hard refresh the page to get things to work.
floofy222 8y ago
Is there a good read somewhere about Travis CI vs Circle CI vs gitlab ?
- emilycook 8y ago
  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.html https://about.gitlab.com/devops-tools/circle-ci-vs-gitlab.ht... GitLab vs TravisCI: https://about.gitlab.com/devops-tools/travis-ci-vs-gitlab.html https://about.gitlab.com/devops-tools/travis-ci-vs-gitlab.ht...

cheez 8y ago

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)

jrochkind1 8y ago
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?
- zitterbewegung 8y ago
  Some products are feature complete and since they are looking at long term earnings they won’t sunset the project which are two big pluses .
- swasheck 8y ago
  as a former customer of idera (and a customer of their competitors), even their core products don't really get much ongoing development attention. they _were_ quite good for what they were, when they were current. after a while, though, they do just become subscription streams.
- cheez 8y ago
  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.
dotancohen 8y ago
Honestly, for enterprise users that is a good thing. In the hands of a company like Idera we can be reasonably confident that Travis will not disappear anytime soon. Under independent - or forbid Oracle / Google stewardship - that is far less certain.
- kevin_b_er 8y ago
  Travis will likely slow rot under Idera, looking at how its owned by a private equity firm. This is better in some ways than getting Our Incredible Journey'd under someone like Google.
- TheJimMcKeeth 8y ago
  As an employee of Embarcadero I can tell you they do invest in new development. Delphi has received a number of new features and updates since Idera aquired us. Could they invest more? You can always invest more, but it is important for the long term that the company and products continue, which Idera seems good at. * this is a comment from me personally and not an official company statement.
  - papasound 8y ago
    Do you think they will have enough money to fix gazillion of RIO bugs? Cause i have a feeling that Delphi is is getting out of tracks and nobody cares about it anymore? But i wish i am wrong since i like it very much.
    - TheJimMcKeeth 8y ago
      Kind of off topic to this discussion, but yes.
- cheez 8y ago
  I completely agree. Not making a judgement on the model, it is what it is.

jrochkind1 8y ago

Yeah, I've been seeing lots of people switch to circle-ci or gitlab over the past year. Not totally sure why. Travis does what I need and I know how to use it, and I don't particularly want to learn something new for CI myself, I just want to code!

strig 8y ago
CircleCI has a free tier for private repos, same with Gitlab.
- chucksmash 8y ago
  The private repo pricing was what drove me to try an alternative to Travis in the first place. The cheapest private repos plan is $70/mo now and, if memory serves, when I looked into it previously it was >$100/mo. Fine for startups I guess. For the use case of someone who wants a CI server that, say, runs tests on their Project Euler private repo it's a no-way-no-how price point. I assume they've thought this through and it's done purposefully. Still, side projects tools are a gateway to real project usage.
radomir_cernoch 8y ago
Personally, I've seen growing stability issues. Builds are failing for no apparent reason and work fine after a manual restart. Circe CI was the next free service to try.
- freedomben 8y ago
  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 productivity of being unable to reach the web interface.
  - 8y ago

dschep 8y ago

I've actually seen (and need to do so myself) a few migrate to(or move even more into) Travis because they've added Windows builds. AFAIK they're the only hosted CI that offers Linux, Mac, AND Windows builders.

iamed2 8y ago
Azure Pipelines was the first one, and would probably have a better service overall if they had better documentation and supported more languages/environments.
- tracker1 8y ago
  Azure DevOps (formerly VSTS) in general moves really quickly, relative to everyone else. At least it feels that way... the multiple names to search for (vsts, tfs, "azure devops") also makes it hard to find stuff in general searches. Often the results are prior versions, and it's still hard to figure out. I dread when I have to tweak things. I do appreciate the service(s) a lot though. Pipelines is one of the better CI/CD platforms I've ever used anywhere. It's just, like you said, sometimes hard wrt documentation.
- jeremyepling 8y ago
  I’m a product manager on Azure Pipelines. Can you tell me more about what’s missing in the docs and language support to make it better. Email works as well jepling at microsoft dot com.
- dschep 8y ago
  Ah, I'll have to check it out
lazerwalker 8y ago
FWIW, as someone in the process of trying to set up an Electron app to generate Linux / Mac / Windows builds on CI, I found Travis's Windows support to be unusably slow and flaky. I hear Appveyor and Azure Pipelines are the two most usable Windows build systems; I'm quite happy on Appveyor.

manigandham 8y ago

Looks like they bought Froala too, which is the best html editor we've used so far.

dotancohen 8y ago
What does the $144 Froalo offer that open source alternatives don't? Serious question. The Froalo site is not convincing at all.
- manigandham 8y ago
  Have you tried the demo? It's incredibly feature-filled and acts like a real editor with drag/drop, content embeds, etc. while still producing clean HTML output. It's not as fancy as the abstracted editors that have their own non-DOM format structure but they usually are missing many other features. The pricing has increased and the hobby plan probably isn't worth it but the product itself is good if you need an editor.

jherdman 8y ago

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 https://github.com/travis-ci/travis-ci/issues/8537). It's also vastly easier to parallelize your test suite. With Travis we had to install a third party gem to run our Rails' across many nodes. We also had to hand-manage balancing. With Circle we simply followed the docs, and we're off to the races.

ArturT 8y ago
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-parallel-jobs-with-build-matrix-feature-fast 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.knapsackpro.com/2018/improve-circleci-parallelisation-for-rspec-minitest-cypress https://docs.knapsackpro.com/2018/improve-circleci-paralleli...
- obfk 8y ago
  +1 for Knapsack. It's cumulative savings for our CI/CD has been tremendous.

Spartan-S63 8y ago

I've also, anecdotally, started seeing more Azure Pipelines badges on open source projects, too.

ethomson 8y ago
Indeed - from the Azure Pipelines side of things, we started seeing a fair number of open source projects move some of their workloads over to us when we announced unlimited build minutes for open source projects. (I'm a PM for Azure DevOps.) From my perspective, it's been interesting to see how people do. Some people bring all of their builds, of course, but some people split it up so that it's a mix of Azure Pipelines and Travis (or, of course, something else). Some people are bringing one or two platforms over - maybe they had Travis working as their build validation system, but it was doing Linux builds. So adding Windows builds with Azure Pipelines made sense. Or they wanted to do macOS or iOS builds, so they started building on our macOS build agents. Anyway, I'm happy for Travis and I'm glad to see that they're excited about this acquisition. I can speak from first hand experience that running builds for open source projects takes a lot of resources. So I trust that this will help them make sure that they're in a position to continue helping out the open source projects and communities.

audiolion 8y ago

I prefer TravisCI to CircleCI, but I can get CircleCI on a private repo with their free plan. I honestly don't prefer CircleCI's UI/UX, it frequently is missing or caching info and I have to hard refresh the page to get things to work.

floofy222 8y ago

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

emilycook 8y ago
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.html https://about.gitlab.com/devops-tools/circle-ci-vs-gitlab.ht... GitLab vs TravisCI: https://about.gitlab.com/devops-tools/travis-ci-vs-gitlab.html https://about.gitlab.com/devops-tools/travis-ci-vs-gitlab.ht...