[nerdjon]

I still fail to see the heavily opinionated appeal of CircleCI over running a dockerized Jenkins instance (and agents) in AWS. (Or GitHub Actions or any other managed CI environment)

We get all the customization I want and it scales just fine.

But I am also still annoyed that when CircleCI announced their templates, they did not offer you the ability to have private templates (or something along those lines, it left a bad taste in my mouth and we moved to Jenkins a couple months later)

[tauntz]

There are _a lot_ of companies/teams that don't need/want to manage the complexity that comes with setting up and configuring generic CI environments. They want to get going as fast as possible and never have to think about what's going on behind the scenes - that's especially true in some specific areas. For example mobile apps. 90% of people aren't too happy about managing all the complexity that comes with having to juggle Xcode versions or Android emulators etc in a scalable way.

..at least that's my experience and why I founded an extremely opinionated CI service for mobile apps years ago :)

[rhodysurf]

This is exactly why we use it. We legit don’t have time to manage more in house services and need CI. Eventually we probably move to GitHub actions but that isn’t free for orgs.

[nerdjon]

I will admit that needing to build mobile apps in CI is one particular challenge I have never needed to deal with.

But I can see that specific use case being a good one for an opinionated CI environment.

I largely work with Docker containers and Serverless. 2 areas that I don't see any advantages going outside of Jenkins (and see many downsides)

[tedmiston]

I used CircleCI a long time ago, just before and after 2.0, and thought it was fine.

These days GitHub Actions is awesome and full featured and does everything I want though without getting in the way. I doubt I'd use anything besides GHA unless I wanted to decouple from GitHub as a dependency.

Even then, I wouldn't be surprised if someone else hasn't already come up with an open source or local runner for the GHA yaml files as a stopgap.

[watermelon0]

Two downsides of GHA that I could find:

- you are limited to 2 core / 7 GB instance, whereas CircleCI offers up to 16 cores / 64 GB (for example, building software usually scales proportionately to machine size, and this can in theory be up to 8x faster on CircleCI)

- no support for ARM instances

[tedmiston]

The details you listed sound accurate for the built-in GitHub-hosted runners.

GHA also supports bringing your own self-hosted runners [1][2] where you install their agent, so you could, e.g., use an ARM instance on AWS with tons of cores. It looks like CircleCI offers this as well.

[1]: https://docs.github.com/en/actions/hosting-your-own-runners/...

[2]: https://github.com/actions/runner