Ask HN: Should we build support for more CI platforms, or features for Actions?

4 points by igorzij 2 years ago | 4 comments

Currently, Github Actions is de-facto the only fully supported CI platform in Digger, we’ve been building it as a CI-agnostic tool (https://github.com/diggerhq/digger) from get go. We keep getting requests to support more CI systems on our community slack and over Github issues (https://github.com/diggerhq/digger/issues/81).

Unlike other automation tools for Terraform, Digger doesn’t run jobs on the server; instead it uses your CI (like Actions) as a compute backend. This is more secure and also much cheaper if you use your own runners in your CI.

But each CI and each VCS is ever so slightly different; and we are now at a crossroads - Should we build support for more CI platforms, or more features for GitHub Actions? We’d love any thoughts/inputs!

codingdave 2 years ago |

> "We keep getting requests to..."

If you are getting consistent feedback from your customer base that they desire a feature, why would you second-guess that feedback by asking a different group of people if they agree?

igorzij 2 years ago | |

it's anything but trivial (otherwise we wouldn't ask); the case for not following certain feature requests goes roughly like this: are those potential users asking for a new feature _same people_ as your ICP or _different people_?

If the former, as in one can imagine an actual person using both features A and B, then obviously, you should ship what users are asking for. But if they are different people - meaning that no one person would use both A and B - then instead of making product better for your customer base, you'd be making the product available to more people. Which conventional startup wisdom advises against (YC, lenny, etc because one can ask - why are the remaining people who need A not using your product yet? It's either product not good enough (then you should improve the product for group A first), or the group A too small (then why do A at all and not focus on B?)

Now, with multiple CI backends is not clear-cut at all. We keep debating this internally but seeing both sides of it. On the one hand, it's highly unlikely that an organisation is using multiple CI tools simultaneously. But then how do we know that GitHub Actions is the one? We are self-hostable commercial oss and one of the selling points over Terraform Cloud is security. This seems to be naturally aligned with Gitlab as customers who'd use a self-hosted VCS are probably our perfect targets. And then the case against Bitbucket is that it's kind of fading away, there are still people using it but their share is definitely not growing, somewhat similar to say Travis or Circle.

So yeah, a lot of unknowns

brudgers 2 years ago |

We keep getting requests to support more CI systems on our community slack and over Github issues

Give people a price for the feature they request. The price should reflect the costs of future support. And of course overhead and profit.

Good luck.

igorzij 2 years ago | |

thanks!!