For what it's worth, they already fail to update the status page. We had an "outage" just this morning where jobs were waiting 10+ minutes for an available runner -- resolved after half an hour or so but nothing was ever posted
Last week (Sunday to Sunday) I had a repo running a lot of cron workflows 24/7. After like 4 or 5 days I exceeded the free limits (Pro plan) and so set up self hosted runners.
After like day 2 my workflows would take 10-15 minutes past their trigger time to show up and be queued. And switching to the self hosted runners didn't change that. Happens every time with every workflow, whether the workflow takes 10 seconds or 10 minutes.
I don't want to shit on the Code to Cloud team but they act a lot like an internal infrastructure team when they're a product team with paying customers
ZIRP ended, its remaining monopoly money has been burnt through, and the projected economy is looking bleak. We're now in the phase where everything that can be monetized is being monetized in every way that can be managed.
Free tiers evaporate. Fees appear everywhere. Ads appear everywhere, even where it was implied they wouldn't. The lemons must be squeezed.
And because everybody of relevance is in that mode, there's little competitive pressure to provide a specific rationale for a specific scheme. For the next few years, that's all the justification that there needs to be.
I thought that "Bitbucket" was in your original post and you added only your edit message to say that it was, in fact, Gitlab and not Bitbucket that added cost for self-hosted runners.
I initially felt a bit offended when I saw this. Then I thought about it and at the end of the day there's a decent amount of infrastructure that goes into displaying the build information, updating it, scanning for secrets and redacting, etc.
I don't know if it's worth the amount they are targeting, but it's definitely not zero either.
You would think the fat monthly per-seat license fee we also pay would be enough to cover the costs of checks notes reading some data from the DB and hosting JSON APIs and webpages.
Yeah, I think we’re seeing some fallout from how much developer infrastructure was built out during the era where VCs were subsidizing everything, similar to how a lot of younger people complained about delivery charges going up when they had to pay the full cost. Unfortunately, now a lot of the competition is gone so there isn’t much room to negotiate or try alternate pricing models.
It also seems odd that there's no discussion of using webhooks to replace the self-hosted runners for free, given that it would basically be working the same way. The only difference is who commits get attributed to, and where you go for logs and artifacts (these can probably ride along draft/prereleases or something)
Starting an external CI company for GitHub is becoming more interesting now.
Gitlab offers ability to do CI for external repositories. Travis CI was what everyone used before Github Actions. Time for a new Travis?
Their website is terrible though. Weird geeky interface, and I could only find reams and reams of gushing copy about how great they are. Nothing concrete about why.
CI is one of those twilight zone things that by the time you need something like buildkite, you're making a lot of money, otherwise why would you have such a complicated CI setup? To do it right, you basically need to start spending buildkite money either way in staffing or buying buildkite. There are probably under 50k organizations in the world that need something like buildkite.
It does have a big 'it shouldn't be this expensive' energy, but the market has shown it needs to be unfortunately. Nobody really survives in the CI world without going to complete neglect mode or goes expensive like buildkite I've found. It reminds me a lot of home automation / IoT. Lutron costs almost $100 a light switch for really silly economic reasons unfortunately even though the tech is basically unchanged since the 90s.
The interface is also geeky because the only people who are going to even realize you need to spend money on this are other software professionals.
Charging for self-hosted runners is an interesting choice. That's the same cost as their smallest hosted runners [1]
[1] - https://docs.github.com/en/billing/reference/actions-runner-...