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0 pointsmatharmin5y ago0 comments

I disagree with this.

Even a single project with 20-minute build times is enough to slow down or frustrate development.

At the same time, I would not easily justify spending time managing CI infrastructure with my team of 6-10 people.

Things may have changed since then, but the last time I self-managed build agents, it often lead to build jobs being tightly coupled to the build agent and installed software versions. With a docker-based CI system, you are forced to have everything specified in code, making it much more maintainable.

Additionally, hosted CI allows me to do 100 parallel builds on Linux, MacOS and Windows. Perhaps this is a niche use case, but I saved a lot of time and reduced build times by an order of magnitude by switching from self-hosted CI on Windows and MacOS to a hosted solution.

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brmgb5y ago

> At the same time, I would not easily justify spending time managing CI infrastructure with my team of 6-10 people.

The step from a docker-based build to a proper build agent is a small one. From there, running your CI yourself on a cloud provider is not particularly hard and at size will quickly be cheaper than having an intermediary.

solatic5y ago

If the number of people who are on the team can fit in a single room, then the release process can easily be run on the laptop of one of the team developers. I don't see how any team of five people consistently releases quickly enough that you would have multiple people trying to release at the same time. A small team should not require tooling to enforce that tests are run before production deploys, that should be either cultural, or part of the script that is easy enough to run on anybody's machine.

Most people do not need CI until you have a separation of concerns (i.e. code from credential management) that are managed by different people/teams, and therefore all of the decisions cannot be made in a single room.

I do see being able to run test matrices across multiple OS or device options as a reason for smaller teams to adopt CI early.

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