Re: Cirrus CI to shut down

Good points.  But I don’t mean host your own build farm. I mean use the
laptop your company gave you.

On Sun, Apr 12, 2026 at 7:22 AM David Chisnall <[email protected]> wrote:

> 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
>
>