CircleCI does only charge for self-hosted runners generated egress and/or artifact storage:
"Any Network Egress to CircleCI will be charged. At this current time, this includes CircleCI Caches, Workspaces, and Artifacts and will be charged at the normal rate according to your Usage Controls.
The only network traffic that will result in billing is accrued through restoring caches and workspaces, and downloading artifacts to self-hosted runners. Retention of artifacts, workspace, and cache objects will result in billing for storage usage.
Since your builds will not be running on CircleCI's Infrastructure, you will not be charged compute credits"
I think that's fair. In my personal opinion most people started using GitHub Actions because it “came for free with the VCS and/or our MS contract” and it was “good enough for the job”. Now might be a good time to look around at the alternatives again. There is a reason that f.e. CircleCI is doing fully focused CI/CD for 10+ years and is still going strong. Plenty of businesses don’t want to put all their eggs in one (MS) basket, for all kinds of reasons. I guess today one of these reasons became obvious.
CircleCI charges for concurrent job runs (which include self-hosted runs), no? They (you, I guess) obfuscate that by saying you get "Unlimited" if you take the "Talk to sales" route but that's not the same as not charging.
There simply is no free lunch, somewhere someone needs to spend effort and time on managing the orchestration layer for the runners, and there is also network traffic and storage in play that costs money. If you need a future-proof CI/CD platform, it takes some investment. I agree that the Github "pay per minute" approach doesn't feel right, most people would probably find a "pay per orchestration job" or something more acceptable.
Agreed there's no free lunch, GH is moving from more generous than the industry to as-generous (or less-generous depending on your opinion of per-minute versus per-job).
By default free plans can run 5x concurrently on self-hosted, 20x minimum for all paying customers, and yes there's a "talk to sales" for >20x on the pricing page
This. There are plenty of good/better CICD solutions out there, but it's tricky to compete with "comes for free with our VCS". I guess it's clear now there is no such thing as a free lunch. I feel it's a good thing for the "CICD industry" that people will be looking around to alternatives, and do a honest Total Cost of Ownership analysis.
CircleCI made great steps the last few years, f.e. to better support proper DRY working, supporting OPA policies-as-code, VSCode extensions with "dry-run" options.
To be clear, I do think CircleCI is a better product than GHA. I just think there's a lot of air sucked out of the room by GHA being available 'for free' and out of the box.
Also, honestly, I don't care about any of those features. The main thing I want is a CI system that is fast and customisable and that I don't have to spend a lot of time debugging. I think CircleCI is pretty decent in that regard (the "rerun with SSH" thing is way better than anything else I've seen) but it doesn't seem to be getting any better over time (e.g. caching is still very primitive and coarse-grained).
Test reporting isn’t the most critical aspect, just an example of something GHA leaves for third party tools to implement.
With CurcleCI, looking through docs, the biggest concern is integration with GitHub. Reading limitations of both OAuth and GitHub App integrations it looks like there’s a race to catch-up with changes a limitations on GitHub side. Not sure if it’s GH not exposing some functionality to third parties to differentiate Actions (e.g. GHA having many more trigger events available) or is that CircleCI needs more time to implement missing features through GitHub App integrations.
Thanks for clarifying, appreciate it! It's true we don't support all the events that Github exposes, but we believe we support the most common and useful ones. Also, this is not set in stone and expanding all the time, f.e. https://circleci.com/changelog/trigger-pipelines-on-github-p...
Although there are definitely merits in moving the complex logic outside of the CI/CD JSON/YAML DSL, especially when using monorepo setups that can become rather complex in their logic (that they made Google create Bazel, I can think of some interesting Borg/K8s analogies btw), I also believe that modern CI/CD platforms have made several sensible steps in the right direction to handle these more complicated use cases.
(Disclaimer: I work at CircleCI)
At CircleCI for example, we have added valuable features like a VSCode extension[0] to validate and "dry-run" config from within your IDE, we have local runners[1] that you can use to test and run pipelines on your local machine and your own infra, we have dynamic config[2], a Javascript/Typescript SDK[3], a CLI that can validate and run workflows locally[4], and QoL additions like a no-op job type[5] and flexible requires, along with flexible when statements and expression based job filters[6].
And finally, it's of course also possible to combine different approaches into a "best of both worlds" approach, f.e. combining Dagger with CircleCI[7].
Out of interest: CircleCI also has flaky test detection, rerun failed tests etc. Or did you mean that the CI that you were moving towards could benefit from Captains features?
I didn't make myself clear I think. You mention that you love Captain, and wish you had access to it when migrating away from CircleCI. I'm interested in understanding the specific reason(s) for your love for Captain's features, that seem to also be available in CircleCI?
"Any Network Egress to CircleCI will be charged. At this current time, this includes CircleCI Caches, Workspaces, and Artifacts and will be charged at the normal rate according to your Usage Controls.
The only network traffic that will result in billing is accrued through restoring caches and workspaces, and downloading artifacts to self-hosted runners. Retention of artifacts, workspace, and cache objects will result in billing for storage usage.
Since your builds will not be running on CircleCI's Infrastructure, you will not be charged compute credits"
https://support.circleci.com/hc/en-us/articles/2064321965685...
I think that's fair. In my personal opinion most people started using GitHub Actions because it “came for free with the VCS and/or our MS contract” and it was “good enough for the job”. Now might be a good time to look around at the alternatives again. There is a reason that f.e. CircleCI is doing fully focused CI/CD for 10+ years and is still going strong. Plenty of businesses don’t want to put all their eggs in one (MS) basket, for all kinds of reasons. I guess today one of these reasons became obvious.
Disclaimer: I work at CircleCI.