Re: Cirrus CI to shut down
David Chisnall <[email protected]>
| Newsgroups | gmane.os.freebsd.devel.hackers |
|---|---|
| Message-ID | <[email protected]> |
On 12 Apr 2026, at 01:36, Joe Schaefer <[email protected]> wrote: > > 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. The economics are simple: It is much cheaper to run on hosted VMs. We do LLVM CI on GCE with Cirrus-CI. We use a fast (16-core, I think, might be 32-core) Ampere VM to get rapid turnaround (build + tests is 15-20 minutes, less with a warm ccache. Cirrus has infrastructure to use a cloud storage account for ccache, a build of LLVM with this configured takes under two minutes for an incremental PR build). On every merge to our main branch, we spin up x86-64 and AArch64 VMs to do release builds and push to artefact storage. This costs us around £20/month. If we invested this money on buying a fast CI machine, we would have £240. That wouldn’t even pay for the RAM in the CPU that we use, let alone the other infrastructure that we’d need.to operate all of it (isolated network connectivity and so on). David