[andrewl-hn]

Looking at Idera portfolio, I see Embracadero (Delphi developers for many years), Sencha (Ext.js), Assembla (was GutHub of Subversion era). So it seems like they buy companies and products that were big and very important among developersin the past, but not necessary leading the pack today.

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.

[cheez]

That's exactly what they do, and the reason is that there is a long tail of subscription revenue that will continue to trickle in. They monetize that very well (for the owners)

[dotancohen]

Honestly, for enterprise users that is a good thing. In the hands of a company like Idera we can be reasonably confident that Travis will not disappear anytime soon. Under independent - or forbid Oracle / Google stewardship - that is far less certain.

[TheJimMcKeeth]

As an employee of Embarcadero I can tell you they do invest in new development. Delphi has received a number of new features and updates since Idera aquired us. Could they invest more? You can always invest more, but it is important for the long term that the company and products continue, which Idera seems good at.

* this is a comment from me personally and not an official company statement.

[papasound]

Do you think they will have enough money to fix gazillion of RIO bugs? Cause i have a feeling that Delphi is is getting out of tracks and nobody cares about it anymore? But i wish i am wrong since i like it very much.

[TheJimMcKeeth]

Kind of off topic to this discussion, but yes.

[kevin_b_er]

Travis will likely slow rot under Idera, looking at how its owned by a private equity firm. This is better in some ways than getting Our Incredible Journey'd under someone like Google.

[cheez]

I completely agree. Not making a judgement on the model, it is what it is.

[jrochkind1]

This suggests that, at least from track record so far, for products in their portfolio one should not expect much more extensive development or innovation, they're just counting on the long-tail of revenue trickling in?

[zitterbewegung]

Some products are feature complete and since they are looking at long term earnings they won’t sunset the project which are two big pluses .

[swasheck]

as a former customer of idera (and a customer of their competitors), even their core products don't really get much ongoing development attention. they _were_ quite good for what they were, when they were current. after a while, though, they do just become subscription streams.

[cheez]

This is not true. They make strategic investments to keep their products relevant. They are not making the next Google/Amazon/Apple, just running a business effectively.

[jrochkind1]

Yeah, I've been seeing lots of people switch to circle-ci or gitlab over the past year.

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!

[radomir_cernoch]

Personally, I've seen growing stability issues. Builds are failing for no apparent reason and work fine after a manual restart. Circe CI was the next free service to try.

[AsyncAwait]

Worth plugging https://sr.ht I guess. It's free for now and it's going to be very cheap[1] when it does start requiring a subscription. In addition to supporting the open-source developer who gave us things like Sway, you'd also be able to build on platforms like RISC-V, which I don't think anybody else offers.

1 - As little as $2/month, apparently.

[jhasse]

No Windows or macOS support though. Also Git integration isn't as straight-forward as it is with Travis/Circle CI.

[freedomben]

FWIW, I'm currently using Circle for several builds, and am actually looking at alternatives now. The web interface has been falling over (which is highly disruptive to developers when they can't look at build results and trigger deploys, etc).

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.

[markonen]

At my company we've just finished migrating our Android builds from CircleCI to Buildkite (we did the iOS migration in December).

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.

[obfk]

Buildkite is a dream. Their technology is spot on, and it's changed the way we develop/integrate/release.

[williamdclt]

We usually use CircleCI at my company. I never realised how good I had it until I had to use Travis at my current project :)

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

[mnutt]

We also use travis + a monorepo and yeah TRAVIS_COMMIT_RANGE is broken. We end up just tagging successful master builds and generating our commit range off of that.

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.

[williamdclt]

Not a bad idea but travis only does a shallow clone, do you unshallow it? Doing a `git fetch --unshallow` was slow, and hanging forever about one time out of 5 when I tried a few weeks back

[mnutt]

Yeah, in this case we did though I can see a lot of instances where the benefits don’t outweigh the costs.

[MapleWalnut]

Don't you need to do the same hacking within CircleCI?

[williamdclt]

I do, but at least it is feasible (at least I think, never actually needed to do it). With Travis, even being willing to hack around, I just didn't manage to get it working at all

[epage]

I feel dirty for saying this but Azure Pipelines is the service that is tempting to me because of the power of its file format (variable substitution, conditionals, template tasks and steps).

[foolip]

We use Azure Pipelines for https://github.com/web-platform-tests/wpt with some help from friends at Microsoft, and it's a great product!

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!

[rasjani]

I’m quite liking azure for now and most of my company’s foss projects run there. But. Reason for getting lost is abysmally bad documentation. Yeah, all that I need is there but it’s structured so so bad.

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...

[GordonS]

No need to feel bad, it's a great product! I've been using Azure DevOps for a while now, and it's what I use for anything not OSS (I prefer GitHub for that, and TBH it's what others expect)

[WorldMaker]

It's also interesting how much Open Source is moving to Pipelines for just build services, regardless of where their code is hosted. The Python setup on Pipelines is really cool to dig into if you get the chance. I believe Python has been using it as the primary CI for their GitHub repo for bit now, and from what I've heard they've looked into using Pipelines to support a test matrix nearly as robust as their older BuildBot config.

[blattimwind]

The onboarding process of Pipelines is very smooth once you manage to sort the OAuth/account stuff out. And they actually have helpful docs to boot.

[ElFitz]

I never believed I'd ever pick a Microsoft product over anything else.

And yet, here we are... Azure Pipelines

Edit: VS Code too

[jrochkind1]

Curious if anyone has used Azure Pipelies with Rails projects and has a review.

(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).

[ethomson]

I think that you want somebody who's unbiased to answer this from their perspective (I'm a PM for Azure DevOps, so I'm pretty biased). But I've built out Azure Pipelines for many platforms, including Ruby and RoR with a lot of success. Feel free to drop me an email (my HN username @microsoft.com) and I can point you to some pipelines.

[jrochkind1]

Cool. The trick is, I don't want to "build out a pipeline", I just wanna write a handful of lines in a single config file and be up and going, which is what travis has given me.

But Azure is def on my list to check out!

[ethomson]

Haha, yes, sorry for making it sound bigger than it is. If you just want to do some build & test validation, it should just be a single yaml file. Not identical to Travis but close. We even added some getting started documentation if you’re familiar with Travis. https://docs.microsoft.com/azure/devops/pipelines/migrate/fr...

[vishnu_ks]

The main reason why we moved to CircleCI was due to the rising test flakes and outages in TravisCI. Also, TravisCI comes with a lot of crap pre-installed which can be a pain sometimes. With CircleCI you can provide your own custom Docker image for running the build. If the build fails there is even an option to SSH into the build to debug. This issue has a lot of details on what it takes to migrate an open source project from Travis CI to CircleCI if you are interested. https://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues/7748

[jfaat]

You can ssh and debug a travis build as well

[blueyed]

But only on travis-ci.com, not for Open Source (.org) IIRC.

[DrTorte]

(Disclosure: Travis CI Employee)

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.

[e-mail] And we'll set you right up with debug mode. :)

[ivan4th]

There used to be a catch, though, don't know if it's already fixed. If you use this ssh debugging feature you make your secrets world-accessible (anyone can connect to ssh and grab them). This was one of the reasons why I switched to CicleCI, actually (besides their Workflows).

[involans]

You do realise that the two platforms are being merged, with .org projects being migrated to .com?

[imwm]

We switched from Travis CI to Circle CI because Circle CI was (a) significantly faster and (b) a little cheaper

[jillesvangurp]

We made a smilar decision in 2017. The reason was that our builds were stupidly slow because travis uses cheap instances. There was no option to fix that other by allowing more concurrent builds. Travis has no feature to actually allow users to have reserved instances of a particular type. Money was not the issue; the feature does not exist.

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.

[emilycook]

GitLab is an LLC, GitHub is what's owned by MS

[sytse]

GitLab is an Inc. :)

Still independent.

[thijsvandien]

GitHub. Microsoft does not own GitLab. :)

[jillesvangurp]

Heh, similarly named companies. You get my point though ;-)

[briandear]

Travis is nice, but the cost always make me look at Semaphore or Codeship.

[andyidsinga]

curious though - what event / issue motivated you to even start looking for another solution?

[wtetzner]

And as far as I can tell, CircleCI doesn't seem to support Windows yet.

For one of my projects, I have TravisCI building release binaries for Windows, Linux, and macOS.

[edaemon]

I've chosen CircleCI over Travis for some projects because CircleCI is free for private repositories (to an extent). Travis is only free for open source, and is slightly more expensive for similar resources.

Of course that doesn't explain why open source projects would switch, but it could just be a mind share thing.

[strig]

CircleCI has a free tier for private repos, same with Gitlab.

[chucksmash]

The private repo pricing was what drove me to try an alternative to Travis in the first place. The cheapest private repos plan is $70/mo now and, if memory serves, when I looked into it previously it was >$100/mo.

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.

[ksec]

And I have been wondering if Circle-CI will be the next battle between Microsoft and Google.

[jherdman]

I've switched my personal projects, and my employer has switched to Circle over the past year. Circle's dockerized strategy for building up your CI/CD platform means that they support the new version of X nearly the day it comes out. Historically Travis has been very slow at this. Their support for Postgres 10 was an embarrassment (https://github.com/travis-ci/travis-ci/issues/8537). It's also vastly easier to parallelize your test suite. With Travis we had to install a third party gem to run our Rails' across many nodes. We also had to hand-manage balancing. With Circle we simply followed the docs, and we're off to the races.

[ArturT]

I work on knapsack gem to split tests across parallel CI nodes. To do optimal balancing I developed a dynamic test suite split with Queue approach.

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...

[obfk]

+1 for Knapsack. It's cumulative savings for our CI/CD has been tremendous.

[dschep]

I've actually seen (and need to do so myself) a few migrate to(or move even more into) Travis because they've added Windows builds. AFAIK they're the only hosted CI that offers Linux, Mac, AND Windows builders.

[iamed2]

Azure Pipelines was the first one, and would probably have a better service overall if they had better documentation and supported more languages/environments.

[jeremyepling]

I’m a product manager on Azure Pipelines. Can you tell me more about what’s missing in the docs and language support to make it better. Email works as well jepling at microsoft dot com.

[tracker1]

Azure DevOps (formerly VSTS) in general moves really quickly, relative to everyone else. At least it feels that way... the multiple names to search for (vsts, tfs, "azure devops") also makes it hard to find stuff in general searches. Often the results are prior versions, and it's still hard to figure out.

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.

[dschep]

Ah, I'll have to check it out

[lazerwalker]

FWIW, as someone in the process of trying to set up an Electron app to generate Linux / Mac / Windows builds on CI, I found Travis's Windows support to be unusably slow and flaky.

I hear Appveyor and Azure Pipelines are the two most usable Windows build systems; I'm quite happy on Appveyor.

[epage]

> I hear Appveyor and Azure Pipelines are the two most usable Windows build systems; I'm quite happy on Appveyor.

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.

[Spartan-S63]

I've also, anecdotally, started seeing more Azure Pipelines badges on open source projects, too.

[ethomson]

Indeed - from the Azure Pipelines side of things, we started seeing a fair number of open source projects move some of their workloads over to us when we announced unlimited build minutes for open source projects. (I'm a PM for Azure DevOps.)

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.

[manigandham]

Looks like they bought Froala too, which is the best html editor we've used so far.

[dotancohen]

What does the $144 Froalo offer that open source alternatives don't? Serious question. The Froalo site is not convincing at all.

[manigandham]

Have you tried the demo? It's incredibly feature-filled and acts like a real editor with drag/drop, content embeds, etc. while still producing clean HTML output.

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.

[audiolion]

I prefer TravisCI to CircleCI, but I can get CircleCI on a private repo with their free plan. I honestly don't prefer CircleCI's UI/UX, it frequently is missing or caching info and I have to hard refresh the page to get things to work.

[floofy222]

Is there a good read somewhere about Travis CI vs Circle CI vs gitlab ?

[emilycook]

Disclaimer, I am a GitLab employee, but we have some docs on this that you can find here:

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...