Hosted CI is a hot space, and fairly recently the git hosting providers (Bitbucket and Gitlab) also entered the game with their own hosted services. Some hosting providers also have some overlap with CI functionality or specific CI services on their own. I wonder what people in the HN community thinks about the CI space as of today.<p>1. Do you think it's overcrowded? Is there space for new companies or is CI basically a "solved problem"? If not what do you dislike with current offerings?<p>2. Do you prefer a third party CI as compared to the hosting provider offering their own CI at a lower price? Assuming here that the hosting provider would offer lower price because their main income is from the 24/7 hosting fees. Or would you simply switch to the hosting providers CI if it was good?<p>Disclosure: I am the founder Sourcevoid, a cloud/PaaS company. I'm a little split on how much CI functionality we should integrate into our platform, compared to just trying to promote third party CI providers instead. We already do a fair amount via our build system, but at the same time CI is more than just the build process of course. This question is not about our company or our offerings, I just think it's an interesting question to discuss.
I find that it's just like the bug tracker space: There's a <i>lot</i> of contenders, but <i>somehow</i> none of them actually hits the sweet spot.<p>For CI, it's either: "too GUI" or "not enough programmable".<p>Also, CI is an area that absolutely cries out for container technology, but the state of containers on Linux[1] is absolutely abysmal. Maybe it'll be better in ~5 years when we'll hopefully be about 40% towards the capabilities with Solaris Zones. (Here's a hint: If you cannot fully 'contain' root and users/mounts/devices, then you're not being serious.)<p>[1] The most popular platform for this, by a far margin.
<i>Nathan: You’ve shown with Freckle that you can enter a saturated market like time tracking and still do well.</i><p>Amy: “Saturation” is a load of bullshit :)<p><i>Nathan: Really it just shows the market exists.</i><p>Amy: It’s more than that. So much more than that. If a million people use Harvest, there’s no way they’re all served well by the same tool. The presence of other products doesn’t just show opportunity, it CREATES opportunity. Because wherever there’s a big biz, there will be lots of dissatisfied customers.<p>Source: <a href="https://stackingthebricks.com/difficulties-for-nathan-barrys-app-experiment/?_r=uf" rel="nofollow">https://stackingthebricks.com/difficulties-for-nathan-barrys...</a>
If you could make a self-hosted Jenkins replacement that is even half as good as Jenkins (think extensions) but written in not Java, I think it'd receive a lot of positive reception.<p>The trick with CI, like task/project management software, is that people don't look at what works. They don't try and compete on intrinsics like stablility, extensibility, etc, and really after 12 months on any platform, any mid-large size company is going to care more about those things than new shiny.<p>Jenkins had the absolute worst UI for a long time, and it still was many people's top choice for CI. You're generally writing a tool for programmers, after all.
It's a well-populated space. If you're going to enter it, you need to be clear about differentiation.<p>We picked our CI solution because it was the only cloud offering we could find that supported Bitbucket and also allowed us to set up our own fully-custom environments to run against - without Docker.<p>Sadly, it took about a week's worth of research to figure that out. And I'm a bit concerned that in this crowded market they'll go out of business and leave us high and dry.
I think that as evidenced by the discussion about concourse ci today <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14785254" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14785254</a> that there is still room for improvement and new products, especially on-prem CI tools like Jenkins/TeamCity/Bamboo/Concourse.