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Build is one of those things that I can't see the economy in buying cloud VMs for if you have lots of load. Buy a rack and a dozen cheap-ish rack chassis with
by alkonaut 4y ago
Build is one of those things that I can't see the economy in buying cloud VMs for if you have lots of load.
Buy a rack and a dozen cheap-ish rack chassis with some middle range CPUs with lots of cores but not necessarily the highest specs otherwise (Last gen we used 9700K and for a recent refresh it's AMD 7700X). You can get quite far at $1k per node and $12k for a rack. Then you can run 3-4 build agents per node so you have a 48 agent cluster in your rack. Electricity and management will be on top of the purchase price of course, but it's still a bargain.
Even if you do use cloud compute for builds, it's worth having some self-hosted nodes for the base need and just using the cloud for peak use scaling.
- hhh 4y agoThe cost of someone to manage and support this in my org would cost more than it is worth. Gitlab runners on an autoscaling group handles load for me and scales up and down with need. Took 2-3 hours to set up, and has lasted 2 years without incident. The value for me is cost (especially in time) to implement, mental burden, and risk of delaying projects.
- alkonaut 4y agoIt depends on what resources you have on hand obviously, but perhaps more it will depend on resource usage. There is little point buying a rack and having it idle. If you have very bursty workloads then scaling pays off. If you run your rick nice and warm even over nights and weekends then it's more economic to have self hosted I imagine.