Travis CI acquired by Idera(blog.travis-ci.com) |
Travis CI acquired by Idera(blog.travis-ci.com) |
I didn't think of Travis in that regard, though in a past few month I started to see Circle CI badges popping here and there for opensource repositories and anecdotally many internal projects at companies are moving to GitLab and their built-in CI offering.
Probably a good time to sell the company, though I'd prefer if they would find a better buyer.
Not totally sure why. Travis does what I need and I know how to use it, and I don't particularly want to learn something new for CI myself, I just want to code!
To give an example: we have a monorepo and it's impossible to only run the tests of the project that has been updated. Even if you're ready to hack around with git. Even if you're ready to hack around with Travis internal functions. Because TRAVIS_COMMIT_RANGE is just broken.
And your argument "people switch to circle-ci, not sure why, Travis does what I need and I know how to use it" doesn't really make sense, other people would say that CircleCI does what they need and they know how to use it
For one of my projects, I have TravisCI building release binaries for Windows, Linux, and macOS.
Of course that doesn't explain why open source projects would switch, but it could just be a mind share thing.
Here is example for Travis CI https://docs.knapsackpro.com/2018/how-to-run-travis-ci-paral...
And this is the graph showing the difference if you compare knapsack_pro dynamic tests split with what CircleCI does which is basically only time-based split. https://docs.knapsackpro.com/2018/improve-circleci-paralleli...
I hear Appveyor and Azure Pipelines are the two most usable Windows build systems; I'm quite happy on Appveyor.
From my perspective, it's been interesting to see how people do. Some people bring all of their builds, of course, but some people split it up so that it's a mix of Azure Pipelines and Travis (or, of course, something else). Some people are bringing one or two platforms over - maybe they had Travis working as their build validation system, but it was doing Linux builds. So adding Windows builds with Azure Pipelines made sense. Or they wanted to do macOS or iOS builds, so they started building on our macOS build agents.
Anyway, I'm happy for Travis and I'm glad to see that they're excited about this acquisition. I can speak from first hand experience that running builds for open source projects takes a lot of resources. So I trust that this will help them make sure that they're in a position to continue helping out the open source projects and communities.
GitLab vs CircleCI: https://about.gitlab.com/devops-tools/circle-ci-vs-gitlab.ht...
GitLab vs TravisCI: https://about.gitlab.com/devops-tools/travis-ci-vs-gitlab.ht...
I'd moved to Circle CI two years ago, and the only tasks/projects of mine still running on Travis are those which are deprecated, in suspended animation, or abandoned. For myself and my immediate peers, Travis is obsolete, and they did it to themselves. With Azure pipelines now a thing (and also far superior to Travis) I see another slow, slow death of a pioneering service.
https://github.com/travis-ci/travis-ci/issues/9745
Now bought by a private equity firm, which usually doesn't indicate lots of innovation or an increase in quality on the way.
I wonder if I should be worried and start migrating my projects. I really liked travis for so long.
(Disclosure: Travis CI Employee)
The migration from GitHub hooks is actually just about complete. You can see the changelog entry here: https://changelog.travis-ci.com/migrating-from-github-servic...
Apologies for the lack of public updates on this!
Really kind of down to the wire though, eh?
It would be really disastrous if the deadline were to be missed, but even if it goes smoothly in the end, how it's been handled does not inspire confidence. One documentation page still says "The migration was planned to start at the end of Q2 2018, but has been pushed back. We will announce a new date as soon as we are able." --https://docs.travis-ci.com/user/open-source-on-travis-ci-com...
I've never heard of any of the software in Idera's brand portfolio. I wonder what the cultural change is like internally at a company joining the umbrella of a private equity firm.
Expect layoffs and all future work to be outsourced via fixed cost development to lowest bidders (mostly in India). Also expect a big sales push for multi year contracts.
Nothing wrong with India, just that companies like Idea don't like to have developers on payroll, and the ones that do write specs all day long.
I think GitHub Actions will become a major force in the CI market in short order, it has so many things going for it
a) Everyone already has an account and lots of code already lives there. One less extra thing to worry about.
b) I trust MS/GitHub with my Cloud secrets more than I trust the various other CI providers.
c) The financial backing of MS to provide a significant free tier
d) The fact that actions can so easily be shared on GitHub is a killer feature. More are more projects/companies will build actions for their end users.
Though lately ruby-travis cli has been broken for me on Arch, and with their YAML changes & associated complexity... I'm starting to look forward to Github actions.
A particular issue is the PR merge-commit builds. Between stages a merge/push into master can change the merge-commit! This means code between stages can diverge. You may build an artifact in one stage, then run an out-of-date test suite against it in another. Known issue for years, had an employee acknowledge months ago on the community forum then.. Nothing.
Another pain point that is not unique to Travis, is the lack of true "pipelines". Inter-project builds are a complete DIY crap fest. Coupled with roll-your-own artifact storage and retrieval.. Self-hosted solutions like Bamboo and TeamCity(Bamboos superior IMHO) are light years ahead of the SaaS solutions I've viewed.
Test report analysis is another big feature missing from most. Would be good to be able to visualize and report on tests. I was almost considering this being a valid stand-alone SaaS idea because nobody has it!
I believe the future of our integration/system tests will be build on codepipelines or the like for scale. Travis or CircleCI will be the public facing component.
Thanks for the contribute to the open source projects!
Their model seems to be farming out choosing canned replies to the cheapest labor they can find. Things that break will stay broken, no one they keep employed will actually know how anything works, let alone how to maintain it.
With so many competing CI services out there now, it's kind of hard to keep using Travis. They've added Windows support, which is great, but it's ridiculously slow. (a minute to run on Linux, 14 minutes on Windows). And with these slow downs, you quickly run into parallel build (I believe the limit is 3 builds per user).
F.D. I work for Codefresh a full CI/CD solution (competitor to TravisCI)
This is sad, but the conclusion I have come to over the last 3-4 years as well. It was anybody's market 4 years ago, but through a sustained pace I think CircleCI have out-executed Travis consistently.
The thing I find interesting is that, looking at Semaphore CI who used to be far behind Travis, they are now biting at the heels of CircleCI with their 2.0 iteration. From what I understand they are not venture backed and are a smaller team, and yet their product is starting to look like a real competitor. To me this says that Travis just failed to execute well enough, rather than Circle having more money (although that helps).
v2 definitely looks promising but they’re not sunsetting v1. Lots of respect for that as well.
Edit: at the risk of sounding like a fanboy (I guess I am), they also grandfathered us indefinitely on the same price plan we signed. Not many companies do that sadly.
Circle was way ahead of Travis in their docker implementation. The Travis docker stuff always felt like a hack.
Once I started moving more projects to Circle, most of the developers on our team were much happier on Circle.
This is another homepage that already assumes that everyone knows what it does and is no help to people unfamiliar with it.
Yes, but you have to ask them to enable the thing. I used them for ArchMac before I migrated to GitLab. I am contemplating moving back to GitHub and CircleCI, unless I can get my hand on some decent hardware again to run the CI builds.
We were cautiously optimistic when the purchase happened. Idera had just purchased a pair of similar applications with different target audiences, so we thought the products would stick around and there would be a lot of work to do integrating everything. We were right about that (they're all still separately available) but Idera didn't have us in mind to work on it.
Our PM went to Idera's offices and found that it was basically a sales centre and that all the development was outsourced. A week or so later they came and laid off a third of the company. Within 3 months of the purchase, the only employees left were our PM, 2 sales reps, and 2 support.
I can't speak to the software, but I don't like the chances of anyone employed by Travis.
https://www.ideracorp.com/brands
and
Fine for startups I guess. For the use case of someone who wants a CI server that, say, runs tests on their Project Euler private repo it's a no-way-no-how price point.
I assume they've thought this through and it's done purposefully. Still, side projects tools are a gateway to real project usage.
Doing better than me. Only inertia keeps me on Appveyor. Once I have time to look into Azure Pipelines, I'm off Appveyor for my Rust projects.
At least for open source, Appveyor builds are serial (across all of my projects?) and you have to (had to?) go through hoops to setup cron triggers.
For serial builds, it is so bad, half the time I give up waiting and just submit.
For cron, I only care about scheduling about once a month or so to double check none of the tools I rely on break so contributors aren't the first to see them and have a negative experience.
It's not as fancy as the abstracted editors that have their own non-DOM format structure but they usually are missing many other features.
The pricing has increased and the hobby plan probably isn't worth it but the product itself is good if you need an editor.
I dread when I have to tweak things. I do appreciate the service(s) a lot though. Pipelines is one of the better CI/CD platforms I've ever used anywhere. It's just, like you said, sometimes hard wrt documentation.
So I guess they wanted a YouTube add, so it needed video and once they had paid to make that said hey why not stick it on our homepage? Or something like that.
It could have also gone the other way: as a useful video describing how things works, and then it got a second life as an ad - but the former path seems more likely.
---
[1] I'm not sure why they are targeting me so heavily, but I see this ad more than any other, by a large margin.
That community page is outdated and referring to Semaphore Classic (1.0) and 2.0 will be getting proper open source support soon.
* this is a comment from me personally and not an official company statement.
We can do it on .org as well! Just need to reach out to us via email to enable it (as well as the instructions, as it requires a manual API call rather than a UI Button.) And, as Involans also mentioned, we are merging the two together.
support@travis-ci.com And we'll set you right up with debug mode. :)
GitHub Services are going away. This is what .org relied on previously, and we are now mid process of getting everyone moved over to Webhooks instead. So, .org will rely on Webhooks instead.
In the meanwhile, we are still working on getting everyone migrated over to .com as well (which uses GitHub Apps), but that's unfortunately been a bit of a trickier beast than expected. We're still very much working on it, though. Hope that clears it up a bit!
EDIT: We are updating the docs to reflect this. :)
Yes, I thought the two migrations were the same thing. I think maybe y'all thought they were too until recently when you realized you weren't gonna get it done in time?
After all, if the migration to .com really _had_ started in Q2 2018, it probably would have been done long before Github Services went away, and you wouldn't have had to fix .org like you do now. Maybe that's what travis was assuming originally... if at some point that changed, it wasn't communicated clearly, as you acknowledge.
I also was thinking in terms of "the GH api that .org uses that's going away", and "the GH api that .com uses that isn't." I didn't realize there are actually THREE separate GH integration APIs involved? "Github Services", which .org used to use, and is going away. "Github Webhooks" which .org will use soon. And "Github App", which .com uses?
It's all very confusing.
But that's why it's incumbent on y'all to explain it. When we get a warning from Github some ~8 months ago that travis is using deprecated API's that will go away on Jan 31st, and travis is unable to tell us anything much about the schedule or plan for doing something about that until Jan 20th, and it's still pretty vague... that's either a failure of planning or failure of communication or both on travis' part. None of us, your customers, would wait until the week before drop-dead to remove a deprecated dependency in production software when we had 8 months notice... unless we were in some kind of crisis.
On Jan 31st we will see if travis.org hosted projects keep working without interruption...
(I also don't understand why I can't _choose_ to migrate my app from .org to .com at any time. _Some_ of my peers _have_ migrated their apps, with self-service web UI, but my projects it won't let me. NEW open source projects can be on .com for free. But my existing ones on .org are stuck there waiting on nobody knows what, I don't think I can even delete the project and create it anew on .com... If I'm explaining this unclearly, yes, right, exactly! I know I don't even understand what's going on, and don't want to have to, I just want it to work!
Anyway, I'm not blaming you personally, but trying to give you a flavor of one part of leading to loss of confidence in travis, which I historically have loved, for me personally. And part of that is I used to consider travis _really good_ at communicating what was going on, which as we all know is something developer-customers often value.)
But yeah, so much of it is flaky, and the pricing is noncompetitive. Our current iteration has travis's docker client tunneling to an ec2-based docker server; it's both cheaper and faster and will hopefully make it easier to rip out Travis in the future.
1 - As little as $2/month, apparently.
Circle has some nice features (especially easy artifacting and splitting rspec tests based on historic run-time) but it's not enough to overcome the lost momentum and productivity of being unable to reach the web interface.
I've been very happy with Buildkite so far. The web interface fits my mental model of how things should work much better than CircleCI's ever did.
Our primary reason for switching was CircleCI's unpredictable and high costs on the iOS side (per minute billing combined with slow builds -> monthly fees in the price range of a new Mac mini).
Our Android builds are now about 10 times as fast at the same price.
The savings and the performance benefits are of course wholly due to the bring-your-own-build-machines approach that Buildkite takes. I don't see that as much of a hardship, though, especially since CircleCI 2.0 removed a lot of the "it just works" magic in favor of your own build scripts and Docker images. Preparing the build agents is not significantly more work.
Builds were taking up to 20 minutes and with multiple team members doing prs, it was quite common to be stuck waiting for things to land to our integration environment. This slowed us down a lot and we fixed it by creating a build pipeline in amazon. In there we were able to pick one of their faster instance types and the exact same build ran in something like 5 minutes. I understand the team moved to gitlab pipelines after I left.
I was just discussing this with a guy that works at codeship, a berlin company that was acquired some time ago that creates build tools. He made the point that tools like that are getting replaced by deep pipeline integrations like provided by Gitlab.
There is a need for tight integration between build pipelines, version control systems, issue trackers, alerting, monitoring, cloud providers, kubernetes, etc. You can sort of do this partially but you typically have to deal with gazillions of SAAS solutions of varying quality that typically don't integrate that well and the devops related to that. E.g. making Jira aware of github PRs and build status in jenkins can probably be done but you are dealing with API tokens, access rights, and wonky webhooks, credit card payments, etc. The overhead of setting all of that up for every team is quite high and I've seen teams cut corners here because they have more important/interesting things to do. E.g. typical Jira setups have typically no meaningful integrations with either ci or version control systems. Even well run projects tend to have non trivial amounts of devops related time and cost to manage all this. Many projects simply start by copying whatever they did last time that wasn't completely horrible.
IMHO, this is potentially something MS could get right simply by creating deep integrations between e.g. Azure, Gitlab, and a few other things they own. IMHO, amazon is lacking a few things in their portfolio and it wouldn't surprise me to see them make a move either by launching or acquiring their own things. Google is another company that is missing a few essential things on this front.
Still independent.
It's very "power user" in that it's easy to get lost amongst all the options, but nothing else I've tried has the same breadth of OSes and ability to have one job depend on another in intricate ways. And, 10 free parallel builds, including macOS!
Also, hosted agents have small inconsistencies that make the pipeline to have ton of do this on Linux but not in OS X or windows and so forth...
And yet, here we are... Azure Pipelines
Edit: VS Code too
(Yeah, I know, all these CI things are hypothetically platform agnostic, but then there's reality, different platforms-under-test have different sorts of problems which become priorities for the CI platform to smooth out and make just work, or don't).
But Azure is def on my list to check out!