Comments on: Outsourcing Continuous Integration

By: The Build Doctor

The Build Doctor — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 03:39:34 +0000

Hello again! One of my customers has to comply with not only his own regulatory environment, but those of his customers. They'll regularly send auditors around to make sure that there's no realistic potential for fraud in the development process. So, yes they may be paranoid, but it's probably not a paranoia that can easily be treated. VPN access may help some.

By: Krzysztof Choma

Krzysztof Choma — Fri, 28 May 2010 19:41:04 +0000

Disclaimer: I'm working for company that provides CI on Cloud to enterprises.

Having some experience in the subject, I'd like to remove two myths

Slava, you are right that virtualized EC2 environment is not good for CI. However for example Bitbar provides pretty fast CI on the Cloud – simply the machines are not virtualized! And you can easily add more machines if you have many long-running builds.

A comment on the security of outsourcing CI.
You can get exclusive VPN access to the cloud, so that even your CI provider wouldn't be able to access your data on the Cloud. Moreover, the machines holding the data wouldn't be able to access or get accessed from the internet in any way. I think that this level of security is more than enough for most of the 'paranoids' mentioned in the article.

By: Continuous Integration in the cloud

Continuous Integration in the cloud — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 07:22:55 +0000

[...] batter your database for a long time while staying almost idle. Slava Imeshev kindly commented on myoutsourcing continuous integration post: My take on this is that hosted CI in a common virtualized environment such as EC2 won’t [...]

By: Slava Imeshev

Slava Imeshev — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 23:21:28 +0000

My take on this is that hosted CI in a common virtualized environment such as EC2 won't work. A CI or a build server, unlike the rest of the applications, needs all four components of a build box, CPU, RAM, disk and network I/O. The industry wisdom says applications that are subject of virtualization may demand maximum two. Sure you can run a build in EC2, but you will have to sacrifice build speed, and that's usually the last thing you want to do. If you want fast builds, you have to run in the opposite direction, towards a dedicated, big fat box hosted locally. Viewtier has been hosting Continuous Integration for open source projects for five years, and our experiences shows that even builds on a dedicated build box begin to slow down if the number of long-running builds exceeds a double of number of CPUs. Actually, we observe a trend towards farms of build machines hosted locally.

By: Could your next development environment be in the cloud? « Mike CI blogs

Could your next development environment be in the cloud? « Mike CI blogs — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 15:24:35 +0000

[...] One area which is less mature is hosted continuous integration. There are currently only a small number of pioneering providers in this space, which may surprise some, as the practice of continuous integration is at the heart of the Agile development process. The SaaS multi-tenant application model does not fit easily with the requirements for continuous and often complex software builds. It is computing resource intensive activity, especially for programming languages such as Java, and this will inevitably impact the cost of such a service to the end-user. Mike CI is one of these pioneers and there is a good analysis of the others here. [...]

By: Julian Simpson

Julian Simpson — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 22:38:57 +0000

@douglassquirrel: Okay. I guess that the elasticity of price depends on the size of organisation and the domain. Certainly what you just said is about 100% true for companies that do financial services.

By: Douglas Squirrel

Douglas Squirrel — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 12:18:43 +0000

No, no! Cost is _not_ the first issue for security of cloud CI. Steps have to be:
1. convince techie that cloud CI is a good idea. (Existing providers do this.)
2. convince techie that cloud CI will pass audit. (Need reference customer. Chicken and egg.)
3. convince auditor to pass cloud CI. (Requires pen and the ability to tick boxes all day. Your first customer will give you a sample list – how did you get that first customer again?)
Only consider cost once you’ve solved 2. and 3. The costs of in-house CI are so high that once you’ve done this you can almost certainly find someone willing to cover your bills plus a decent margin.

By: simpsonjulian

simpsonjulian — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 22:16:38 +0000

@douglassquirrel, thanks for the insightful comments. I’ve pondered the security a lot. I guess the problem is going to be cost for security. Nail that one and you’re done. I think VPN’s are going to resolve a big chunk of those issues, and proving that there’s no theoretical risks to be had at the other end. For example, I could outsource someone’s CI services to a dedicated machine in a secure enclosure in a datacenter, It wouldn’t be cheap, but I could do it. Finding clever ways to resolve that problem would be the challenge.

Winning some Ebay auctions to test out ancient operating systems would be a laugh. The cost would be securing Windows 2000 and 98 from the outside world, probably with an old-fashioned Cisco firewall to block traffic from anywhere but the CI systems. You’re right in that someone would have to scale up to make it worth while. Or the other approach is to try and run them all in emulators, or Wine, but that might invalidate some testing.

By: Mike mentioned by the Build Doctor « Building Stuff That Matters

Mike mentioned by the Build Doctor « Building Stuff That Matters — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 11:12:56 +0000

[...] Published October 9, 2009 Uncategorized Leave a Comment We got our first mention in the blog-o-sphere today with a good article on the pros and cons of outsourced continuous [...]

By: Douglas Squirrel

Douglas Squirrel — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 00:14:41 +0000

Another thought: you are right that all vendors may soon offer a wide variety of modern OSes on their build agents. A way to differentiate would be to offer _old_ OSes. Imagine the pain of a company who has important clients still on Windows 2000 or 98 (this is not unheard of, believe me). You can’t even buy those systems any more except maybe on ebay or something, and forget maintaining them (even in a VM they must be a nightmare). Dev teams in this situation may have no other way to run CI other than to outsource to someone who can afford the setup cost.