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by bitops
4664 days ago
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A total yearly cost of $70K isn't all that bad when you break down the numbers. Software engineer salaries are typically much higher, let alone considering HR & insurance expenses. So that's one employee you don't have to hire. I was on a team of 4 that, among other responsibilities, managed several TeamCity instances, all of them pretty large. Generally speaking, once it was up and running, it was pretty low overhead and easy to automate. So I think it really is worth thinking hard about the cost before people dive in and roll their own solutions. And there's always the argument of: instead of building your own, why not work to improve an existing OSS solution? |
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This unfortunately has not been my experience with off-the-shelf CI solutions (open source or otherwise). Of course in all instances, we were writing a lot of new code and continuously enhancing old code so the projects under CI were very active. We dealt with CI systems being overloaded, builds breaking for cryptic environment setup reasons, and just an overall slowness due to memory leaks that were hard to diagnose and only occurred in the CI environments.
In the smaller teams, one engineer would essentially become "the build guy" that would babysit the CI system. In larger teams, this became a function of a Configuration/Release management team. In all cases, CI was a regular pain point unless there a lot of customization done over a long period of time.
At the surface level, a custom CI solution wouldn't take long to write. A simple poller to check version control, a script to build, and some basic notifications could probably be hacked together quickly and iterated on over time.