Re: Cirrus CI to shut down

I have never understood the economics of cloud builds.

I always advise developers to run an isolated container on their own
hardware and hook *that* into GitHub actions.  Makes tons of sense for CI.

On Sat, Apr 11, 2026 at 5:33 PM David Chisnall <[email protected]> wrote:

> On 11 Apr 2026, at 20:56, Tomek CEDRO <[email protected]> wrote:
> >
> > On Sat, Apr 11, 2026 at 7:07 PM Alan Somers <[email protected]> wrote:
> >> Cirrus CI is the best cloud CI platform for FreeBSD projects (as well
> >> as most other operating systems).  And I'm proud to have been Cirrus'
> >> first beta user running FreeBSD.  But alas, it's no more.  Cirrus will
> >> be shutting down permanently on June 1.  I've feared this day for a
> >> long time, due to the lack of evident new development.  But it doesn't
> >> mean that I'm not disappointed.  I guess we'll all have to switch our
> >> projects to Github Workflows now, even though it's far less efficient
> >> where FreeBSD is concerned.
> >>
> >> RIP, Cirrus
> >>
> >> https://cirruslabs.org/
> >
> > Ugh, bad news :-( GitHub is known not to support FreeBSD for years we
> > asked with no result. Maybe this will make them somehow support
> > FreeBSD? Maybe Cirrus CI could be used on FreeBSD infra as external
> > runner?
>
> Deeply frustrating.  We use it because it’s easy to wire up a cloud
> subscription and (pay to) use fast machines.
>
> Sadly, their pricing made it quite hard to pay *them*, rather than pay the
> cloud provider directly, which made me suspect it wasn’t sustainable.  If
> anyone can recommend an alternative, that would be great.  GitHub’s pricing
> for faster runners or ones with bigger disks is laughable (10x markup over
> the underlying Azure VMs - I’d happily pay 50% to not think about the
> management, but at 10x it’s cheaper to roll your own).
>
> David
>
>
>