
Travis CI acquired by Idera - involans
https://blog.travis-ci.com/2019-01-23-travis-ci-joins-idera-inc
======
andrewl-hn
Looking at Idera portfolio, I see Embracadero (Delphi developers for many
years), Sencha (Ext.js), Assembla (was GutHub of Subversion era). So it seems
like they buy companies and products that were big and very important among
developersin the past, but not necessary leading the pack today.

I didn't think of Travis in that regard, though in a past few month I started
to see Circle CI badges popping here and there for opensource repositories and
anecdotally many internal projects at companies are moving to GitLab and their
built-in CI offering.

Probably a good time to sell the company, though I'd prefer if they would find
a better buyer.

~~~
jrochkind1
Yeah, I've been seeing lots of people switch to circle-ci or gitlab over the
past year.

Not totally sure why. Travis does what I need and I know how to use it, and I
don't particularly want to learn something new for CI myself, I just want to
code!

~~~
epage
I feel dirty for saying this but Azure Pipelines is the service that is
tempting to me because of the power of its file format (variable substitution,
conditionals, template tasks and steps).

~~~
foolip
We use Azure Pipelines for [https://github.com/web-platform-
tests/wpt](https://github.com/web-platform-tests/wpt) with some help from
friends at Microsoft, and it's a great product!

It's very "power user" in that it's easy to get lost amongst all the options,
but nothing else I've tried has the same breadth of OSes and ability to have
one job depend on another in intricate ways. And, 10 free parallel builds,
including macOS!

~~~
rasjani
I’m quite liking azure for now and most of my company’s foss projects run
there. But. Reason for getting lost is abysmally bad documentation. Yeah, all
that I need is there but it’s structured so so bad.

Also, hosted agents have small inconsistencies that make the pipeline to have
ton of do this on Linux but not in OS X or windows and so forth...

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andrew_
Circle CI has been steadily taking marketshare away from Travis for many, many
years. And in my personal experience, mostly because of Travis' slow pace of
improvement. Using containers for testing blows away performance on Travis for
comparable tasks. Travis had made some improvements this last year to their
workflows, configuration, and platform, but too little too late. My experience
in dealing with their customer service (we did have a paid plan for some time)
and customer feedback (feature requests, pleas for fixes, etc) was also quite
poor.

I'd moved to Circle CI two years ago, and the only tasks/projects of mine
still running on Travis are those which are deprecated, in suspended
animation, or abandoned. For myself and my immediate peers, Travis is
obsolete, and they did it to themselves. With Azure pipelines now a thing (and
also far superior to Travis) I see another slow, slow death of a pioneering
service.

~~~
bithavoc
Does Circle-CI offers Mac runner for public/open-source projects? This is the
reason I haven't been able to migrate from Travis to Circle-CI for all my
projects, I have an open-source Electron module that I need to test cross
platform so Travis covers Linux and Mac and AppVeyor for Windows.

~~~
dschep
It's worth noting that Travis also supports windows builds now. Which to me is
a HUGE value proposition over CircleCI.

~~~
andrew_
It's a decent point, but if I need Windows based testing, I'll get myself a
free Azure Pipeline account and get Windows in CI from the same folks.

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jrochkind1
I've been worried about travis' lack of urgency in dealing with the fact that
the existing travis-ci.org github hooks used for open source products are
going to stop working in a week or two...

[https://github.com/travis-ci/travis-
ci/issues/9745](https://github.com/travis-ci/travis-ci/issues/9745)

Now bought by a private equity firm, which usually doesn't indicate lots of
innovation or an increase in quality on the way.

I wonder if I should be worried and start migrating my projects. I really
liked travis for so long.

~~~
DrTorte
Hey there,

(Disclosure: Travis CI Employee)

The migration from GitHub hooks is actually just about complete. You can see
the changelog entry here: [https://changelog.travis-ci.com/migrating-from-
github-servic...](https://changelog.travis-ci.com/migrating-from-github-
services-to-webhooks-86328)

Apologies for the lack of public updates on this!

~~~
jrochkind1
Thanks! Good to know.

Really kind of down to the wire though, eh?

It would be really disastrous if the deadline were to be missed, but even if
it goes smoothly in the end, how it's been handled does not inspire
confidence. One documentation page still says "The migration was planned to
start at the end of Q2 2018, but has been pushed back. We will announce a new
date as soon as we are able." \--[https://docs.travis-ci.com/user/open-source-
on-travis-ci-com...](https://docs.travis-ci.com/user/open-source-on-travis-ci-
com/)

~~~
DrTorte
It's definitely not ideal, but it is less dangerous and close-to-the-wire than
it sounds. It's actually separate from the migration to .com - which is
something we haven't been great at communicating, and after talking it over
yesterday, we're going to post something to clarify it a bit further. (Even
working here, I was personally rather confused about it, and was running
around yesterday chasing people down for answers.) The short of it as follows,
though:

GitHub Services are going away. This is what .org relied on previously, and we
are now mid process of getting everyone moved over to Webhooks instead. So,
.org will rely on Webhooks instead.

In the meanwhile, we are still working on getting everyone migrated over to
.com as well (which uses GitHub Apps), but that's unfortunately been a bit of
a trickier beast than expected. We're still very much working on it, though.
Hope that clears it up a bit!

EDIT: We are updating the docs to reflect this. :)

~~~
jrochkind1
Oh I see.

Yes, I thought the two migrations were the same thing. I think maybe y'all
thought they were too until recently when you realized you weren't gonna get
it done in time?

After all, if the migration to .com really _had_ started in Q2 2018, it
probably would have been done long before Github Services went away, and you
wouldn't have had to fix .org like you do now. Maybe that's what travis was
assuming originally... if at some point that changed, it wasn't communicated
clearly, as you acknowledge.

I also was thinking in terms of "the GH api that .org uses that's going away",
and "the GH api that .com uses that isn't." I didn't realize there are
actually THREE separate GH integration APIs involved? "Github Services", which
.org used to use, and is going away. "Github Webhooks" which .org will use
soon. And "Github App", which .com uses?

It's all very confusing.

But that's why it's incumbent on y'all to explain it. When we get a warning
from Github some ~8 months ago that travis is using deprecated API's that will
go away on Jan 31st, and travis is unable to tell us anything much about the
schedule or plan for doing something about that until Jan 20th, and it's still
pretty vague... that's either a failure of planning or failure of
communication or both on travis' part. None of us, your customers, would wait
until the week before drop-dead to remove a deprecated dependency in
production software when we had 8 months notice... unless we were in some kind
of crisis.

On Jan 31st we will see if travis.org hosted projects keep working without
interruption...

(I also don't understand why I can't _choose_ to migrate my app from .org to
.com at any time. _Some_ of my peers _have_ migrated their apps, with self-
service web UI, but my projects it won't let me. NEW open source projects can
be on .com for free. But my existing ones on .org are stuck there waiting on
nobody knows what, I don't think I can even delete the project and create it
anew on .com... If I'm explaining this unclearly, yes, right, exactly! I know
I don't even understand what's going on, and don't want to have to, I just
want it to work!

Anyway, I'm not blaming you personally, but trying to give you a flavor of one
part of leading to loss of confidence in travis, which I historically have
loved, for me personally. And part of that is I used to consider travis
_really good_ at communicating what was going on, which as we all know is
something developer-customers often value.)

~~~
DrTorte
Yep, totally agree that it is very confusing. Definitely appreciate all your
feedback (and not taking it at all personally!) and it helps immensely. I'm
gonna try to skip the PR speak, but I'm hoping we'll be able to regain that
confidence when we make the right changes. :)

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throwawaymath
Interesting. All I can tell from Idea's homepage is that it likes to acquire
companies: [https://www.ideracorp.com](https://www.ideracorp.com). It looks
like it's just a private equity firm (or the acquiring arm of one, since it's
owned by TA Associates).

I've never heard of any of the software in Idera's brand portfolio. I wonder
what the cultural change is like internally at a company joining the umbrella
of a private equity firm.

~~~
superqd
Yeah, one of their "brands" is also called Idera, and I worked there for many
years prior to the acquisition. But, yeah, just shortly prior to the
acquisition, most of the dev group were let go to improve the bottom line, and
a small group of 4 or 5 devs were kept and promoted to manage an outsourced
team in some other country to continue developing the products. The atmosphere
post acquisition was different, though, being at the company while it was
growing, the culture also shifted as we grew from scrappy startup to "we are
now in a high rise office tower" corporation.

~~~
mbrumlow
And then from a high rise to a shitty office space where you could regularly
see hookers on the elevators and at least while I was there the bank at the
bottom was robbed at gun point twice.

~~~
superqd
Sounds so exciting! :^)

------
tnolet
Curious to what this means for the Berlin tech scene in general. Travis was
certainly one of the trailblazers and a high visibility local startup (next to
probably Soundcloud).

~~~
l5870uoo9y
European tech scene is completely dominated by US companies, this one company
(unknown to people outside the tech scene) won't change that at all.

~~~
i_cant_speel
Why does it matter whether or not a tech company is known by people outside
the tech scene?

------
mbrumlow
And with that I declare this product dead... Idera is the last stop to squeeze
cash out of a company.

Expect layoffs and all future work to be outsourced via fixed cost development
to lowest bidders (mostly in India _). Also expect a big sales push for multi
year contracts.

_ Nothing wrong with India, just that companies like Idea don't like to have
developers on payroll, and the ones that do write specs all day long.

------
krn1p4n1c
The first startup I was at was acquired by Idera. They started by trying to
replace everyone in the dev team with remote contractors. I cashed out and
left as soon as possible.

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talawahtech
Lots of mention of CircleCI and Gitlab as the reason for Travis' downfall,
which is very true. I also think GitHub announcing GitHub Actions[1] may have
been the final nail in the coffin.

I think GitHub Actions will become a major force in the CI market in short
order, it has so many things going for it

a) Everyone already has an account and lots of code already lives there. One
less extra thing to worry about.

b) I trust MS/GitHub with my Cloud secrets more than I trust the various other
CI providers.

c) The financial backing of MS to provide a significant free tier

d) The fact that actions can so easily be shared on GitHub is a killer
feature. More are more projects/companies will build actions for their end
users.

1\. [https://github.com/features/actions](https://github.com/features/actions)

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dewski
I would have loved to paid Travis CI for my personal private repositories I
wanted to kept private, that I push to maybe 1-2 times a night on a good week.
Setup is a breeze, interface is simple and straight to the point, integration
works. But they priced their "Ideal for hobbyist projects" plan way out of
budget for any hobbyist who just wants somewhere to run some code. $70 a
month!? Make it $15, maybe $20 and you got yourself an annual subscriber.

------
hendry
Loved Travis support over the years. I wish them the best.

Though lately ruby-travis cli has been broken for me on Arch, and with their
YAML changes & associated complexity... I'm starting to look forward to Github
actions.

------
Rapzid
Lots of issues with Travis CI feature velocity as well. Most of the other pain
points others have mentioned I have felt. Random build failures, network
issues, and etc.

A particular issue is the PR merge-commit builds. Between stages a merge/push
into master can change the merge-commit! This means code between stages can
diverge. You may build an artifact in one stage, then run an out-of-date test
suite against it in another. Known issue for years, had an employee
acknowledge months ago on the community forum then.. Nothing.

Another pain point that is not unique to Travis, is the lack of true
"pipelines". Inter-project builds are a complete DIY crap fest. Coupled with
roll-your-own artifact storage and retrieval.. Self-hosted solutions like
Bamboo and TeamCity(Bamboos superior IMHO) are light years ahead of the SaaS
solutions I've viewed.

Test report analysis is another big feature missing from most. Would be good
to be able to visualize and report on tests. I was almost considering this
being a valid stand-alone SaaS idea because nobody has it!

I believe the future of our integration/system tests will be build on
codepipelines or the like for scale. Travis or CircleCI will be the public
facing component.

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mhd
Given the dreadful Sencha acquisition, this doesn't sound too good for the
employees. Hope you'll find good replacement positions.

------
resca79
Congrats to the founders, that I met during a conference, super developers.

Thanks for the contribute to the open source projects!

------
samblr
Can anybody help point/predict numbers involved in acquisition ?

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jarvuschris
As a Sencha user that has gone through Idera acquiring a product I use, don't
count on any product development or meaningful support coming out of them

Their model seems to be farming out choosing canned replies to the cheapest
labor they can find. Things that break will stay broken, no one they keep
employed will actually know how anything works, let alone how to maintain it.

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xPaw
Looks like a lot of people are having troubles with Travis CI in this thread,
we do too.

With so many competing CI services out there now, it's kind of hard to keep
using Travis. They've added Windows support, which is great, but it's
ridiculously slow. (a minute to run on Linux, 14 minutes on Windows). And with
these slow downs, you quickly run into parallel build (I believe the limit is
3 builds per user).

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yhoiseth
For people coming to this thread looking for alternatives: I'm quite happy
with Scrutinizer [1], especially for the easy setup and automatic code quality
analysis.

1\. [https://scrutinizer-ci.com/](https://scrutinizer-ci.com/)

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m00dy
Glad to hear that. Travis is also being used in my company and every build
spawns a new virtual machine which takes almost a year to boot up. I heard
good things about CircleCI. will give it a try asap.

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i386
There’s no market for standalone CI/CD. Everything is converging around
automation, cloud platforms and version control hosting.

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awill
To all of these types of acquisitions, my initial thoughts are always "At
least it wasn't oracle"

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yingw787
Congratulations on the acquisition!

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kkapelon
The main problem with Travis was that is stayed with the CI part (as the name
suggests) while people wanted a CI/CD solution that helps with deployments and
monitoring as well.

F.D. I work for Codefresh a full CI/CD solution (competitor to TravisCI)

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lumengxi
Could be better, could have been worse.

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sitkack
When will name change to "Travisa Continuo" be announced?

