Comment by mystified5016
2 days ago
Our CI runners live on a box in the corner of the office and their only operating cost is my time.
Paying someone for CI compute seems insane. The load is so variable that you never know if your monthly bill will be zero or several hundred/thousand dollars. I especially don't want my employees to consider that each and every push costs the company a nonzero amount of money. CI should be totally free and unrestricted. If a new employee has a really bad day and fires off a hundred CI runs (as we all have), I don't want to explain to accounting why there's an enormous spike in the bill.
It costs us a couple of my salaried hours a month to maintain our on-site infra. Far, far less than our present AWS bill. Most months it needs no attention. It just sits there and does its job. Hell, it's even solar powered.
Ok.
You could:
- host your own set of static runners on AWS -- which, have a fixed monthly cost.
- pay a provider for hosted runners -- most providers bill in CI Minutes. So you will run out of minutes if jobs run amok, not run up your bill.
- Set up auto-scaling runners that ebb and flow based on demand. This case is the one that represents the risk you are describing of an unexpected bill increase.
2/3 cases of "paying someone else for CI compute" are just as predictable as your solution cost-wise. Yours could be cheaper, but the risk of "unexpected bill increase" is not really there.
fyi GitHub bill in minutes, and rounds up. So if you use 1 minute and 1 second, you get billed for 2 minutes. This is applied at job level, so it quickly gets out of control if you use matrix builds.
https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/8726
I wish I had builds that ran that fast, lol... omg that would be epic ;P.
And his solution will still be cheaper.
Can you share how it works?