u/FlowParticular235

not even saying github is unusable or anything dramatic like that. im just tired man lol

feels like every few weeks its some new annoyance. actions queues randomly slow, marketplace actions dying, weird runner issues, copilot pricing drama, random outages that somehow never fully show up on the status page. then u spend 2 hours debugging some workflow problem and realize u havent actually worked on the project itself the entire night

ive been looking around more lately at other setups/tools just to see what people are actually using once they hit this point. gitlab, forgejo, self hosted runners, depot, tenki, random smaller CI tools i barely knew existed before. not really trying to fully migrate rn, mostly just trying to stop everything from depending on one ecosystem

anyone can give me their two cents on this stuff?

lately ive been noticing that some of the most annoying slowdowns in development arent even coming from the code itself anymore. its stuff around the workflow. waiting for runners, rerunning flaky jobs, builds randomly slowing down depending on time of day, trying to keep environments consistent across different machines. none of it sounds huge individually but together it starts breaking the flow way more than i expected

what surprised me is how early this started happening too. i always assumed these were “big company problems” but even with relatively small projects the friction starts piling up once u have more tests, more branches, more people pushing changes, etc. and then every solution kinda creates another tradeoff. github hosted runners get expensive or inconsistent, self hosting gives more control but now ur maintaining infra too

these days ive been spending more time thinking about workflow reliability itself instead of just raw build speed. been trying different setups and tools mostly to see what actually scales without becoming another thing to babysit. github actions is still where most stuff runs for me but ive also been experimenting w tenki alongside some self hosted runner setups just to compare how different approaches behave under heavier workloads. starting to feel like the hard part isnt making CI fast anymore, its making it stay predictable once the workflow gets more complicated

a few months ago i got annoyed enough with github hosted runner costs that i started moving more stuff onto self hosted ones. at first it honestly felt like the obvious choice. builds were faster, caching actually worked properly, and i stopped watching jobs sit around waiting to start all the time
but after a while the runner itself started becoming part of the workload. one machine randomly goes offline, another one drifts slightly from the others, then suddenly you’re debugging CI environments instead of the project you were originally trying to ship
the annoying part is i still can’t decide which side is worse. github hosted runners started feeling overpriced once builds got heavier, but fully self hosting everything slowly turned into another system to maintain too
lately i’ve mostly just been splitting workloads across different setups depending on what actually needs the extra control. still experimenting a bit with services like tenki alongside the self hosted stuff, mostly because i’m trying to avoid turning CI into its own full time project

i switched to self-hosted runners a few months ago mainly because github hosted ones were getting too slow and expensive for what we were doing. at first it actually felt like a big win, builds were faster and we had more control over everything but after a while it started getting kind of messy. random issues with runners going offline, having to keep environments in sync, weird failures that don’t show up consistently. nothing catastrophic, just a bunch of small things that keep interrupting the flow

i keep going back and forth on whether this is just part of scaling CI or if i overcomplicated things trying to optimize too early. like it works, but it also feels like i’m maintaining the pipeline almost as much as the actual project. i did try moving one of the workflows to tenki just to see how it compares without all the setup. haven’t fully switched anything over, just testing it alongside everything else for now. wondering how others handle this stage. do you just accept the overhead or is there a cleaner way people are running this without it turning into its own system to manage

a few months ago i got annoyed enough with github hosted runner costs that i started moving more stuff onto self hosted ones. at first it honestly felt like the obvious choice. builds were faster, caching actually worked properly, and i stopped watching jobs sit around waiting to start all the time. but after a while the runner itself started becoming part of the workload. one machine randomly goes offline, another one drifts slightly from the others, then suddenly you’re debugging CI environments instead of the project you were originally trying to ship
the annoying part is i still can’t decide which side is worse. github hosted runners started feeling overpriced once builds got heavier, but fully self hosting everything slowly turned into another system to maintain too. lately i’ve mostly just been splitting workloads across different setups depending on what actually needs the extra control. still experimenting a bit with services like tenki alongside the self hosted stuff, mostly because i’m trying to avoid turning CI into its own full time project