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by meghan_rain 1194 days ago
The classic HN Dropbox comment, never gets old.
2 comments

… sometimes, I do think it's merited. We switched to Github Actions for our CI and it's been … mixed. It was a hell of a lot of work to switch (GHA is significantly different than what we were moving from and … buggy) and even then, some of the pricing on GHA high. 24¢/GiB/mo for storage[1] which is like 8×? 10×? the sort of cloud baseline, 50¢/GiB data transfer [2], and the runners are similarly costly, IMO. I'm not sure if GHA wins out, in part because we're not done switching.

You can do self-hosted runners aaaand… welcome to infra/ops?

A little NIH syndrome would do the industry good. We need more stuff invented. The current stuff is mediocre.

[1]: https://docs.github.com/en/billing/managing-billing-for-gith...

[2]: I think it's only egress, and only from packages though?

Yes, but all we used gitlab for was git repo hosting with push access control for about 40 repositories to allow sharing code via push/pull and not much else (almost no issues/pull requests). It's ridiculous to pay $2500/yr so that 7 people can do push/pull over slow growing set of ~200MiB of data when it can be handled in much more performant way by a 36$/yr (+ a small one time setup cost) VM we already had for running other things.
Why were you paying for it then?

GitLab has a CE version that’s free for commercial use. It sounds like you just want a pretty interface for git repos with some merge flow.

Running gitlab yourself is just too expensive. Too many docs to read, hard to understand, just too much software in general (just compressed deb package alone is 1GiB in size), hard to backup, hard to debug issues, would require a new separate much more expensive VM, etc. It does weird shit during installation, like contacting letsencrypt and trying to fetch a certificate and failing if the machine is IPv6 only, etc. etc. Recovering from that is not documented anywhere. Too many moving parts. Just sort of blergh for people who like simple solutions.

It doesn't sound like a 1-2hr/year self support software.