

Cost-Efficient Continuous Integration - cpeterso
http://taras.glek.net/blog/2014/02/06/cost-efficient-continious-integration/

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jlas
A little sad to read they're thinking about replacing Buildbot. I spent quite
a bit of time making a Buildbot-based CI system and was very impressed with
its capabilities.

> "Bare metal virtualization with OpenStack for Mac, Windows, ARM boards is an
> open problem"

I guess, more specifically, is the _programmatic_ virtualization of these
systems. As you can't easily program into the cold-start process of Mac or
Windows. Whereas e.g. with RedHat/CentOS you have a kickstart file.

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justincormack
I use buildbot but it does annoy me. Apart from things like not understanding
ipv6 (Twisted's problem I gather), the main issue is that it is hard to
actually get reproducible builds as unlike say Travis CI it does not rebuild
an environment from scratch for each build.

~~~
jlas
That's not really buildbot's fault. You have a lot of control on how your
project builds.

Our build system created a chroot each time it went to build - so that got us
the clean environment we needed. Buildbot had no effect on that, it just ran
the build script.

If you really wanted to you can have buildbot coldstart a machine from scratch
- we coldstarted machines for testing, but it was definitely doable for
building as well.

~~~
justincormack
True, I probably will do. But I also forgot to mention its inability to clean
up stray processes, ita habit of crashing, and all the other small
annoyances...

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kristoffer
I don't understand how it can be cost efficient running CI on Amazon AWS?
Seems like it would be cheaper with a private cloud ...

~~~
justincormack
Well it is a bursty workload, depending when people commit, so some spillage
into public cloud probably makes sense, with base levels on private
infrastructure. But they do say they intend to do most in house.

