It’s not like internal build servers are 100% reliable, scaleable and cheap though. Personally I’ve found cloud based build tools to be just a better experience as a dev.
I’m talking about in a professional environment. You basically need a team to manage them and have a backlog of updates and fixes and requests from multiple dev teams. If you offload that to something cloud based that pretty much evaporates, apart from providing some shared workflows. And it’s just generally a better experience as a dev team, at least in my experience it has been.
Honestly, no, you don’t need a team. It is good practice, but not necessary. I’ve worked at several companies where the production build was made from a tower under a desk or a server blade, or an iMac on a shelf, sometimes one guy knew how it worked, sometimes nobody did, sometimes the whole team did. In most cases, managed by the product’s dev team. IT just firewall-wrapped the crap out of them.
Not to discredit the main meta thread of “we don’t have to manage anything with cloud” vs “having management team” debate. Odd thing is, cloud prices are climbing so rapidly that the industry could shift back in a near future.
Bottom line for most business though: As long as the cost makes sense, why bother self-hosting anything. That’s really what it comes down to. A bonus too, as most companies like being able to blame other companies for their problems. Microsoft knows that, and profited greatly with Windows Server/Office/etc. for that very reason.
When your quarterly profits are dashed because an employee backed into your server room and turned on the halon fire suppression system and you gotta rebuild from scratch from month-old off-site tape backups, how do you write a puff piece to explain that away without self-blame or firing the very people that know how it all works?
When your quarterly profits are dashed because Microsoft’s source control system screwed up, you make a polite public “our upstream software partners had a technical error, we’ve addressed and renegotiated,” message, shareholders are happy, and customers are still stuck with a broken product, but the shareholders are happy.
Well yeah strictly you don’t, but the idea of having a single machine under someone’s desk as a build server managed by one person where you have multiple dev teams fills me with horror! If that one person is off and the build server is down you’re potentially dead in the water for a long time. Fine for small businesses that only have a handful of devs but problematic where you’ve multiple teams.
Bottom line for most business though: As long as the cost makes sense, why bother self-hosting anything. That’s really what it comes down to. A bonus too, as most companies like being able to blame other companies for their problems. Microsoft knows that, and profited greatly with Windows Server/Office/etc. for that very reason.
Yup, exactly this. Why waste resources internally when you can free up your own resources to do more productive work. There’s also going to be some kind of SLA on an enterprise plan where you can get compensation if there’s a service outage that lasts a long time. Can’t really do that if it’s self managed.
In a professional environment, I’ve never had remote-only build systems, with the exception of release signing of locked-down compiler licensing. Otherwise, there’s always been a local option.
Azure devops and pipelines but only that and nothing more (not allowed to deploy to azure/microsoft stuff)
ONLY deploy cf to Aws
write primarily c# for all services, even our websites (iis 7, cshtml)
only exception is a new mobile app which is written in React Native, but even that is more bloated than the windows 11 start menu. It’s the only exception.
Projects are generally so poorly maintained, we’re still using bootstrap 4, outdated framework versions. I know personally there’s a windows server 2003 chugging along somewhere.
“we know about this (medium) bug/vuln, we can work around it. Just add this new feature to the codebase” but imagine this times 100. I quietly fix the bugs because i wouldn’t be able to live with myself otherwise.
the projects are 95% boiler plate for the simplest of tasks (curl a thing and pass it to another service has about 40 different classes), no processing…
“Aws Q first” company where none of the developers actually get access to write code with. Explicitly forbidden from using copilot: “it’ll use our code for their training”… right. Won’t someone think of our flawless, industry standard code. Also, that’s not how that works.
security none existsnt. Aws security tools used to scream at you every time you open the aws console. Solution at the company was to restrict views to those pages so (most) people don’t see the security/vuln reports. To get reports, you’d have to ask cybersec.
most developers are in a constant state of burnout.
There’s more but i’d violate my NDA too much at that point.
we’re expected to hit 1/2 b gbp profit in couple years
i think we, the developers at our company, are the biggest clowns in the entire IT industry. And yeah, we’re reponsible for your gov ids & loan applications.
security none existsnt. Aws security tools used to scream at you every time you open the aws console. Solution at the company was to restrict views to those pages so (most) people don’t see the security/vuln reports. To get reports, you’d have to ask cybersec.
Not going to lie, that is hilarious. And forget red flags, you have a whole squadron of semaphores right there.
Sometimes our internal CI tools break and I can’t build either. I think GitHub actions syntax is actually valid in forgejo as well so I don’t really think it’s a problem.
Reliance on external services to build and test code is absolutely braindead design
It’s not like internal build servers are 100% reliable, scaleable and cheap though. Personally I’ve found cloud based build tools to be just a better experience as a dev.
Jesus Christ, can you not even conceive of the idea of building on your own machine?
I’m talking about in a professional environment. You basically need a team to manage them and have a backlog of updates and fixes and requests from multiple dev teams. If you offload that to something cloud based that pretty much evaporates, apart from providing some shared workflows. And it’s just generally a better experience as a dev team, at least in my experience it has been.
Honestly, no, you don’t need a team. It is good practice, but not necessary. I’ve worked at several companies where the production build was made from a tower under a desk or a server blade, or an iMac on a shelf, sometimes one guy knew how it worked, sometimes nobody did, sometimes the whole team did. In most cases, managed by the product’s dev team. IT just firewall-wrapped the crap out of them.
Not to discredit the main meta thread of “we don’t have to manage anything with cloud” vs “having management team” debate. Odd thing is, cloud prices are climbing so rapidly that the industry could shift back in a near future.
Bottom line for most business though: As long as the cost makes sense, why bother self-hosting anything. That’s really what it comes down to. A bonus too, as most companies like being able to blame other companies for their problems. Microsoft knows that, and profited greatly with Windows Server/Office/etc. for that very reason.
When your quarterly profits are dashed because an employee backed into your server room and turned on the halon fire suppression system and you gotta rebuild from scratch from month-old off-site tape backups, how do you write a puff piece to explain that away without self-blame or firing the very people that know how it all works?
When your quarterly profits are dashed because Microsoft’s source control system screwed up, you make a polite public “our upstream software partners had a technical error, we’ve addressed and renegotiated,” message, shareholders are happy, and customers are still stuck with a broken product, but the shareholders are happy.
Well yeah strictly you don’t, but the idea of having a single machine under someone’s desk as a build server managed by one person where you have multiple dev teams fills me with horror! If that one person is off and the build server is down you’re potentially dead in the water for a long time. Fine for small businesses that only have a handful of devs but problematic where you’ve multiple teams.
Yup, exactly this. Why waste resources internally when you can free up your own resources to do more productive work. There’s also going to be some kind of SLA on an enterprise plan where you can get compensation if there’s a service outage that lasts a long time. Can’t really do that if it’s self managed.
In a professional environment, I’ve never had remote-only build systems, with the exception of release signing of locked-down compiler licensing. Otherwise, there’s always been a local option.
Edit: is my personal experience wrong somehow?
No, that’s actually genius.
How else are you supposed to get random paid break-time, which the boss can’t stop you from even if a crunch is going on?
You’ve clearly not worked at my company
Azure devops and pipelines but only that and nothing more (not allowed to deploy to azure/microsoft stuff)
ONLY deploy cf to Aws
write primarily c# for all services, even our websites (iis 7, cshtml)
only exception is a new mobile app which is written in React Native, but even that is more bloated than the windows 11 start menu. It’s the only exception.
Projects are generally so poorly maintained, we’re still using bootstrap 4, outdated framework versions. I know personally there’s a windows server 2003 chugging along somewhere.
“we know about this (medium) bug/vuln, we can work around it. Just add this new feature to the codebase” but imagine this times 100. I quietly fix the bugs because i wouldn’t be able to live with myself otherwise.
the projects are 95% boiler plate for the simplest of tasks (curl a thing and pass it to another service has about 40 different classes), no processing…
“Aws Q first” company where none of the developers actually get access to write code with. Explicitly forbidden from using copilot: “it’ll use our code for their training”… right. Won’t someone think of our flawless, industry standard code. Also, that’s not how that works.
security none existsnt. Aws security tools used to scream at you every time you open the aws console. Solution at the company was to restrict views to those pages so (most) people don’t see the security/vuln reports. To get reports, you’d have to ask cybersec.
most developers are in a constant state of burnout.
There’s more but i’d violate my NDA too much at that point.
we’re expected to hit 1/2 b gbp profit in couple years
i think we, the developers at our company, are the biggest clowns in the entire IT industry. And yeah, we’re reponsible for your gov ids & loan applications.
ggwp
Not going to lie, that is hilarious. And forget red flags, you have a whole squadron of semaphores right there.
Like I said, braindead
Sometimes our internal CI tools break and I can’t build either. I think GitHub actions syntax is actually valid in forgejo as well so I don’t really think it’s a problem.