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.
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?