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by sourishkrout 539 days ago
I commend anyone who’s taking a hard look at our current CI/CD practices. Good work! Succinctly stating the problems is easier said than done.

I believe https://dagger.io checks all these manifesto boxes and more. At least that’s where I’m focusing my attention.
1 comments
GrumpyCat42 539 days ago
My company is currently adopting this and I don't see the appeal yet - likely from a lack of knowing much about it.

I added it to a side project just to get familiar and it added quite a few sdk files and folders to my project, and lots of decorators. It also required Docker and yadda yadda yadda.

I just could not justify using it compared to just running some regular Typescript file with Bun (or, in a different project, `go run cmd/ci/main.go`)

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sourishkrout 537 days ago
Simple problems require simple solutions. If Makefile, NPM run, or Rake gets the job done, stick with it. That's great.

The problem that Dagger and similar efforts solve is for pipelines at scale, whether that's a sea of microservices maintained by an armada of teams (which never work the same) or your massive pipelines that should be decomposed into a more atomic pipeline that fed into one.

I believe the latter is a big productivity hurdle even without org-scale. My release pipeline runs for 25min with a team <5 because it's multi-staged (testing pyramid) and includes end-to-end tests. I love my pipeline because it makes me feel safe releasing my software upon success.

However, god forbid it fails with a non-obvious error of 20 minutes into exec. Lack of portability (Hi GHA vendor lock-in) and reproducibility (local-run = impossible) will make this feedback-loop hell.

Now, wiseguys might tell me that pipelines shouldn't run for multiple minutes and only unit tests blah. That's divorced from reality. This sentiment won't not solve automation problems and won't optimize for velocity. It merely throws it over the fence to somebody else. If you have "the luxury" a QE/QA/Release team which I feel bad for.

So the question to ask yourself is: how do I know I have outgrown `go run cmd/ci/main.go`?

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