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When Should You Self-Host CI Tools?
How to decide whether you should self-host, go with a SaaS option, or bundle your choice of CI tool through a vendor
Your monthly bill comes in for CircleCI. How can it be this expensive? Thousands of dollars a month just to have it available, which doesn't include the cost of your engineers’ time working with it.
You have a DevOps team. What are they doing again? Shouldn’t they be able to make this work for free?
There are times when any vendor bill at all can cause acid reflux, but that doesn’t mean it's time to cut it out of the budget. So when does it make sense to self-host your CI tools?
CI What?
CI or Continuous Integration is the process where code comes together from multiple developers. Usually, this means it goes into the main branch of a code repository in some version control system such as git.
CI tools, such as the popular Jenkins or Circle CI, allow various tasks to be performed on this code. This often includes ensuring the software can build, run unit or integration tests, and even deploy the software to a development, staging, or production environment.
CI and CD (continuous deployment) practices are essential to modern agile development. Having a CI tool to manage that process is also essential.
The True Cost of Self-hosting
Self-hosting is more expensive than you think. Jenkins, an incredibly popular automation server, is open source and thus free. But free can be very pricey.
I’m a big advocate of Jenkins for teams who need it, but like any open-source software, you’re responsible for deploying new patches, configuring it correctly, and watching out for updates that can significantly affect performance.
I hope you subscribe to multiple security newsletters so you know when the next major vulnerability comes around and you have a team on call to update. And then, once that update rolls out, the plugins and custom tweaks you made may stop working.
This isn’t bad, but it is work, and any time team members spend servicing a tool is a cost. Often, more robust and…
