| This is a problem of misaligned incentives, not just in GitHub, but pretty much every CI provider out there. In fact, the incentives are diametrically opposed in that almost every one of them makes more money when our builds take longer to run, regardless of the reason. So they are financially disincentivized to build anything that could make them faster, or even make it easier to limit the duration, as is the case here. When it does happen, it's a rare triumph of some combination of people with genuinely good intentions, customer demand, and competitive pressure, over the demand for financial returns that every company has to eventually come to terms with, and not sustainable over the super long term. The ones that let us host our own runners at least offer us an escape hatch where we can opt out of the diametrically opposed incentive structure and back into a still-not-aligned but neutral one, but then we give up much of the benefits of CI as a SaaS and have to spend engineering hours building and maintaining our own build infrastructure at a significant cost. Let's not forget that traditional CI in itself is already a commodity where providers sell us dumb CI minutes that we have to spend our own eng hours engineering deployment and testing solutions on top of, and eventually have to sink entire full-time engineering teams' worth of hours into fighting against the natural tendency for these systems to get slower as we add more code and people. I believe the solution is deployment & testing platforms tailored to specific technologies, meticulously engineered to be so ridiculously fast that they can reasonably be offered as an all-you-can-eat plan for a fixed monthly price per seat, instead of the industry standard usage-based pricing of traditional CI providers. This aligns incentives much better in that slow builds hurt the provider's bottom line as much as they hurt customers' engineering productivity, and on the flip side it financially incentivizes constant investments into making the system even faster from the provider side since faster builds means they can serve more customers on the same hardware and pocket the difference as profit. Shameless plug: I've been building one of these platforms at https://reflame.app. Reflame can deploy client-rendered React web apps in milliseconds, fast enough to make deploying to the internet feel like local dev. |