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GitHub’s runners are a joke. Switching to WarpBuild was the best decision I made for my CI/CD. I halved my build time and got cheaper minutes. GH’s macOS runne

GitHub’s runners are a joke. Switching to WarpBuild was the best decision I made for my CI/CD. I halved my build time and got cheaper minutes. GH’s macOS runners particularly were complete trash.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
999900000999 2y ago
I understand the Mac builds, but the entire appeal of GitHub runners is it's literally built in. I can just add a YAML file, and we have CICD!
- joshstrange 2y ago
  I get that, but you can run GH runners on your own hardware or someone else's. Switching to WarpBuild was literally as easy as linking my GH account and changing the running image from `macOS-latest` to `warp-macos-14-arm64-6x` and everything worked. Secrets and everything.
  - palata 2y ago
    > Secrets and everything. I guess you had to import the secrets, too...
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
yohannparis 2y ago
Different needs, different tools! I work on a open-source project, and not having to pay for CI/CD with a "simple" yml file configuration is simpler and easy to manage.
- 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 2y ago
  It's only free if your time is worthless :P every couple weeks I have to debug something that I can't replicate locally because I don't have local CI
  - joshstrange 2y ago
    That's the other plus with something like WarpBuild, I haven't used it yet but you can pause the build and SSH in: https://github.com/WarpBuilds/action-debugger https://github.com/WarpBuilds/action-debugger
  - EionRobb 2y ago
    Have you tried using act for that? https://github.com/nektos/act https://github.com/nektos/act Has saved me a bunch of CI debug pain.
  - vessy-st6io 2y ago
    You can try FlyCI Wingman - an AI agent that analyzes and fixes your failing builds in GitHub actions. We're about to release it tomorrow, so feel free to subscribe and be among the first to try: https://www.flyci.net/ https://www.flyci.net/ .
- joshstrange 2y ago
  If you are open source and getting free minutes then it really doesn't matter how long builds take. I'm still using GH Actions, just not their minutes.
suryao 2y ago
There is a lot of inefficiency in CI today and we're out to solve it. Thanks for the WarpBuild love!
candiddevmike 2y ago
Or just run your own runners on-premise. You'd be amazed at how fast builds can be with OTS hardware, or even something like a laptop or Mac mini.
- joshstrange 2y ago
  I considered this for my personal business but the minutes are stupid cheap and to pay off a Mac mini it would take me many, many years to break even. For a company with 10's-100's-1000's+ employees writing code and needing CI/CD the math will be different. I came close to buying a Mac Mini anyways, costs be damned, to get away from GH's slow runners.
  - dehrmann 2y ago
    > minutes are stupid cheap At smaller scales, as long as your builds aren't stupud-slow, cloud providers should be cheaper just because they can utilize their hardware more (10x?) efficiently.
    - joshstrange 2y ago
      Totally agree, and I called out that my scale is small so cloud makes a lot more financial sense for me (especially as a solo founder, I don't want to manage more hardware than I have to already).
aromeronavia 2y ago
Can't agree more with this, I recently migrated my company to use WarpBuild and our CI got 50% faster, not even kidding. We were using self-hosted runners which were not as efficient as we thought so we spawned EC2 instances and connected them to the github network to be runners, but we had such an amount of issues that we wanted to go back to non-self hosted. At the end a tech lead of the company suggested using Warp and we could not be happier with the results. Also the CEO Surya is such a great guy, we had a small networking issue that lasted for about two hours and they gave us credits for all the runners affected with that, and their customer support is blazingly fast.
- suryao 2y ago
  Thank you so much for the kind words!
- crohr 2y ago
  > We were using self-hosted runners which were not as efficient as we thought so we spawned EC2 instances and connected them to the github network to be runners, but we had such an amount of issues that we wanted to go back to non-self hosted For those hitting that same kind of issue (and you are many), you should check out my product https://runs-on.com https://runs-on.com. 1-click install, 1-click upgrades, and from 7x to 16x cheaper runners on AWS.
  - threecheese 2y ago
    Brilliant idea!! I just dug through your docs. You significantly undercut GitHub on runner pricing, using your customers’ infrastructure for both runners and their orchestration, which is managed by your software, some cloudformation, and amis that you maintain and license in return for a small slice of that savings. I love it, and if our cloudops org ever threatens to charge back CI to our budget I’ll be a customer.
- joshstrange 2y ago
  I was deploying to CloudFormation and I thought that was the slow part but my "build" times went from 20min to 10min. My iOS builds also were halved.
jjice 2y ago
We're a small team (four engineers) and we purchased four Dell mini PCs to toss into our small office space. The break even compared to our AWS hosted runners (which were much faster and cheaper than the GH ones) was like four or five months, plus they cut the time again by over half. We have to deal with them if something weird happens, but it's been such a low time investment that it has been such a great choice. Plus, who doesn't love having some new hardware to play with?
- edweis 2y ago
  Why 4 Dell Minis? You don’t need a monitor for CI/CD, and why 4? Is it for redundancy? Performance? We are interested in doing the same setup.
  - candiddevmike 2y ago
    Not OP, but I went with MOREFINE AMD Ryzen mini PCs. They can be configured with a ton of CPU/RAM (including ECC). They're really compact, support 2.5 Gb ethernet, and are great to work with. A comparable Dell workstation with ECC RAM would've been significantly more expensive, and you have to deal with their business folks to purchase them (or at least I couldn't figure out how to buy them direct).
  - jjice 2y ago
    Wasn't my choice, but one wasn't enough so we threw a few more at it. So mostly for performance, but the redundancy is an added benefit. They were a pretty decent space, power/heat, performance, and noise ratio for us. Our office is a single room with six desks, so space, noise, and heat are a larger consideration for us. I use a mini PC at home for a personal server as well, but that's just because used enterprise equipment is often a great deal.
- dehrmann 2y ago
  > We have to deal with them if something weird happens Check back in three years once you've had to deal with OS upgrades, power outages, running out of disk space, and one of them failing.
KRAKRISMOTT 2y ago
How do they compare to Ubicloud? https://www.ubicloud.com/ https://www.ubicloud.com/
- joshstrange 2y ago
  I think I skipped over evaluating ubicloud because they don't have macOS runners. There was another place I liked but I needed macOS runners they didn't have them either.
- suryao 2y ago
  (WarpBuild founder here) We have had a lot of users evaluate multiple tools including ubicloud but chose us. Typically, they've mentioned our runners being faster, our caching is very useful, and queueing delays being lower. However, my last anecdata was from a few weeks ago. You can try us out and take a call for yourself. Our focus is on CI runners and efficiency and I think that gives us an edge on the devex. Ubicloud is definitely cheaper though.
duped 2y ago
GitHub Actions is a joke. It baffles me that they've been breaking file permissions on upload for years and they haven't fixed it yet. God forbid you want to ship an executable in a tarball or save it for a later stage of your build.
ugh123 2y ago
How do you handle extremely large repos? Can these be cached on machines, per-customer?
- suryao 2y ago
  Assuming the question was reg. WarpBuild - we provide blazing fast caches with unlimited sizes. These still need to be downloaded to machines and setup on each workflow job. We don't (yet) have support for pre-pulled repos on runners per customer. Are the large repo sizes despite fetching only the refs required for the specific context [1][2] which can help speed things up significantly. [1] https://www.atlassian.com/git/tutorials/big-repositories https://www.atlassian.com/git/tutorials/big-repositories [2] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/48072080/how-to-manage-large-git-repo https://stackoverflow.com/questions/48072080/how-to-manage-l...
electroly 2y ago
Ditto. I came for the cheaper Apple Silicon runners (before GitHub Actions had them available for free) and stayed for the faster runs across the board. I cut a 24 minute build down to 10 minutes just by switching over to WarpBuild runners. Not a shill, just a happy customer.
- suryao 2y ago
  And I a happy provider - thank you!

GitHub’s runners are a joke. Switching to WarpBuild was the best decision I made for my CI/CD. I halved my build time and got cheaper minutes. GH’s macOS runners particularly were complete trash.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

999900000999 2y ago

I understand the Mac builds, but the entire appeal of GitHub runners is it's literally built in. I can just add a YAML file, and we have CICD!

joshstrange 2y ago
I get that, but you can run GH runners on your own hardware or someone else's. Switching to WarpBuild was literally as easy as linking my GH account and changing the running image from `macOS-latest` to `warp-macos-14-arm64-6x` and everything worked. Secrets and everything.
- palata 2y ago
  > Secrets and everything. I guess you had to import the secrets, too...
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

yohannparis 2y ago

Different needs, different tools! I work on a open-source project, and not having to pay for CI/CD with a "simple" yml file configuration is simpler and easy to manage.

01HNNWZ0MV43FF 2y ago
It's only free if your time is worthless :P every couple weeks I have to debug something that I can't replicate locally because I don't have local CI
- joshstrange 2y ago
  That's the other plus with something like WarpBuild, I haven't used it yet but you can pause the build and SSH in: https://github.com/WarpBuilds/action-debugger https://github.com/WarpBuilds/action-debugger
- EionRobb 2y ago
  Have you tried using act for that? https://github.com/nektos/act https://github.com/nektos/act Has saved me a bunch of CI debug pain.
- vessy-st6io 2y ago
  You can try FlyCI Wingman - an AI agent that analyzes and fixes your failing builds in GitHub actions. We're about to release it tomorrow, so feel free to subscribe and be among the first to try: https://www.flyci.net/ https://www.flyci.net/ .
joshstrange 2y ago
If you are open source and getting free minutes then it really doesn't matter how long builds take. I'm still using GH Actions, just not their minutes.

suryao 2y ago

There is a lot of inefficiency in CI today and we're out to solve it. Thanks for the WarpBuild love!

candiddevmike 2y ago

Or just run your own runners on-premise. You'd be amazed at how fast builds can be with OTS hardware, or even something like a laptop or Mac mini.

joshstrange 2y ago
I considered this for my personal business but the minutes are stupid cheap and to pay off a Mac mini it would take me many, many years to break even. For a company with 10's-100's-1000's+ employees writing code and needing CI/CD the math will be different. I came close to buying a Mac Mini anyways, costs be damned, to get away from GH's slow runners.
- dehrmann 2y ago
  > minutes are stupid cheap At smaller scales, as long as your builds aren't stupud-slow, cloud providers should be cheaper just because they can utilize their hardware more (10x?) efficiently.
  - joshstrange 2y ago
    Totally agree, and I called out that my scale is small so cloud makes a lot more financial sense for me (especially as a solo founder, I don't want to manage more hardware than I have to already).

aromeronavia 2y ago

Can't agree more with this, I recently migrated my company to use WarpBuild and our CI got 50% faster, not even kidding. We were using self-hosted runners which were not as efficient as we thought so we spawned EC2 instances and connected them to the github network to be runners, but we had such an amount of issues that we wanted to go back to non-self hosted. At the end a tech lead of the company suggested using Warp and we could not be happier with the results. Also the CEO Surya is such a great guy, we had a small networking issue that lasted for about two hours and they gave us credits for all the runners affected with that, and their customer support is blazingly fast.

suryao 2y ago
Thank you so much for the kind words!
crohr 2y ago
> We were using self-hosted runners which were not as efficient as we thought so we spawned EC2 instances and connected them to the github network to be runners, but we had such an amount of issues that we wanted to go back to non-self hosted For those hitting that same kind of issue (and you are many), you should check out my product https://runs-on.com https://runs-on.com. 1-click install, 1-click upgrades, and from 7x to 16x cheaper runners on AWS.
- threecheese 2y ago
  Brilliant idea!! I just dug through your docs. You significantly undercut GitHub on runner pricing, using your customers’ infrastructure for both runners and their orchestration, which is managed by your software, some cloudformation, and amis that you maintain and license in return for a small slice of that savings. I love it, and if our cloudops org ever threatens to charge back CI to our budget I’ll be a customer.
joshstrange 2y ago
I was deploying to CloudFormation and I thought that was the slow part but my "build" times went from 20min to 10min. My iOS builds also were halved.

jjice 2y ago

We're a small team (four engineers) and we purchased four Dell mini PCs to toss into our small office space. The break even compared to our AWS hosted runners (which were much faster and cheaper than the GH ones) was like four or five months, plus they cut the time again by over half. We have to deal with them if something weird happens, but it's been such a low time investment that it has been such a great choice. Plus, who doesn't love having some new hardware to play with?

edweis 2y ago
Why 4 Dell Minis? You don’t need a monitor for CI/CD, and why 4? Is it for redundancy? Performance? We are interested in doing the same setup.
- candiddevmike 2y ago
  Not OP, but I went with MOREFINE AMD Ryzen mini PCs. They can be configured with a ton of CPU/RAM (including ECC). They're really compact, support 2.5 Gb ethernet, and are great to work with. A comparable Dell workstation with ECC RAM would've been significantly more expensive, and you have to deal with their business folks to purchase them (or at least I couldn't figure out how to buy them direct).
- jjice 2y ago
  Wasn't my choice, but one wasn't enough so we threw a few more at it. So mostly for performance, but the redundancy is an added benefit. They were a pretty decent space, power/heat, performance, and noise ratio for us. Our office is a single room with six desks, so space, noise, and heat are a larger consideration for us. I use a mini PC at home for a personal server as well, but that's just because used enterprise equipment is often a great deal.
dehrmann 2y ago
> We have to deal with them if something weird happens Check back in three years once you've had to deal with OS upgrades, power outages, running out of disk space, and one of them failing.

KRAKRISMOTT 2y ago

How do they compare to Ubicloud? https://www.ubicloud.com/ https://www.ubicloud.com/

joshstrange 2y ago
I think I skipped over evaluating ubicloud because they don't have macOS runners. There was another place I liked but I needed macOS runners they didn't have them either.
suryao 2y ago
(WarpBuild founder here) We have had a lot of users evaluate multiple tools including ubicloud but chose us. Typically, they've mentioned our runners being faster, our caching is very useful, and queueing delays being lower. However, my last anecdata was from a few weeks ago. You can try us out and take a call for yourself. Our focus is on CI runners and efficiency and I think that gives us an edge on the devex. Ubicloud is definitely cheaper though.

duped 2y ago

GitHub Actions is a joke. It baffles me that they've been breaking file permissions on upload for years and they haven't fixed it yet. God forbid you want to ship an executable in a tarball or save it for a later stage of your build.

ugh123 2y ago

How do you handle extremely large repos? Can these be cached on machines, per-customer?

suryao 2y ago
Assuming the question was reg. WarpBuild - we provide blazing fast caches with unlimited sizes. These still need to be downloaded to machines and setup on each workflow job. We don't (yet) have support for pre-pulled repos on runners per customer. Are the large repo sizes despite fetching only the refs required for the specific context [1][2] which can help speed things up significantly. [1] https://www.atlassian.com/git/tutorials/big-repositories https://www.atlassian.com/git/tutorials/big-repositories [2] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/48072080/how-to-manage-large-git-repo https://stackoverflow.com/questions/48072080/how-to-manage-l...

electroly 2y ago

Ditto. I came for the cheaper Apple Silicon runners (before GitHub Actions had them available for free) and stayed for the faster runs across the board. I cut a 24 minute build down to 10 minutes just by switching over to WarpBuild runners. Not a shill, just a happy customer.

suryao 2y ago
And I a happy provider - thank you!