Looking at Idera portfolio, I see Embracadero (Delphi developers for many years), Sencha (Ext.js), Assembla (was GutHub of Subversion era). So it seems like they buy companies and products that were big and very important among developersin the past, but not necessary leading the pack today.
I didn't think of Travis in that regard, though in a past few month I started to see Circle CI badges popping here and there for opensource repositories and anecdotally many internal projects at companies are moving to GitLab and their built-in CI offering.
Probably a good time to sell the company, though I'd prefer if they would find a better buyer.
That's exactly what they do, and the reason is that there is a long tail of subscription revenue that will continue to trickle in. They monetize that very well (for the owners)
Yeah, I've been seeing lots of people switch to circle-ci or gitlab over the past year.
Not totally sure why. Travis does what I need and I know how to use it, and I don't particularly want to learn something new for CI myself, I just want to code!
I've switched my personal projects, and my employer has switched to Circle over the past year. Circle's dockerized strategy for building up your CI/CD platform means that they support the new version of X nearly the day it comes out. Historically Travis has been very slow at this. Their support for Postgres 10 was an embarrassment (https://github.com/travis-ci/travis-ci/issues/8537). It's also vastly easier to parallelize your test suite. With Travis we had to install a third party gem to run our Rails' across many nodes. We also had to hand-manage balancing. With Circle we simply followed the docs, and we're off to the races.
I've actually seen (and need to do so myself) a few migrate to(or move even more into) Travis because they've added Windows builds. AFAIK they're the only hosted CI that offers Linux, Mac, AND Windows builders.
I prefer TravisCI to CircleCI, but I can get CircleCI on a private repo with their free plan. I honestly don't prefer CircleCI's UI/UX, it frequently is missing or caching info and I have to hard refresh the page to get things to work.
Circle CI has been steadily taking marketshare away from Travis for many, many years. And in my personal experience, mostly because of Travis' slow pace of improvement. Using containers for testing blows away performance on Travis for comparable tasks. Travis had made some improvements this last year to their workflows, configuration, and platform, but too little too late. My experience in dealing with their customer service (we did have a paid plan for some time) and customer feedback (feature requests, pleas for fixes, etc) was also quite poor.
I'd moved to Circle CI two years ago, and the only tasks/projects of mine still running on Travis are those which are deprecated, in suspended animation, or abandoned. For myself and my immediate peers, Travis is obsolete, and they did it to themselves. With Azure pipelines now a thing (and also far superior to Travis) I see another slow, slow death of a pioneering service.
> Travis is obsolete, and they did it to themselves.
This is sad, but the conclusion I have come to over the last 3-4 years as well. It was anybody's market 4 years ago, but through a sustained pace I think CircleCI have out-executed Travis consistently.
The thing I find interesting is that, looking at Semaphore CI who used to be far behind Travis, they are now biting at the heels of CircleCI with their 2.0 iteration. From what I understand they are not venture backed and are a smaller team, and yet their product is starting to look like a real competitor. To me this says that Travis just failed to execute well enough, rather than Circle having more money (although that helps).
I’ve had a similar experience. It seems like Travis rested on its past reputation for a long time and Circle slowly eroded their lead with a much better platform.
Circle was way ahead of Travis in their docker implementation. The Travis docker stuff always felt like a hack.
Once I started moving more projects to Circle, most of the developers on our team were much happier on Circle.
In case anyone from Circle CI reads here:
I haven't had the need for a hosted CI so far so this is all new to me. I looked at the Circle CI homepage and they have a video on the homepage "See how Circle CI works". Try watching that without sound. It's useless. I'm not sure why anyone would create a video like that.
This is another homepage that already assumes that everyone knows what it does and is no help to people unfamiliar with it.
I wonder if this kind of thing happens so often in software because we get fixated an idea of how a problem should be solved and lose sight of solving the problem. Better solutions that don't dovetail with our model of the world get discounted until the evidence is overwhelming.
Does Circle-CI offers Mac runner for public/open-source projects? This is the reason I haven't been able to migrate from Travis to Circle-CI for all my projects, I have an open-source Electron module that I need to test cross platform so Travis covers Linux and Mac and AppVeyor for Windows.
On a tangent and just because these discussions almost never happen; Jfrog has been my most terrible support experience. We have an OSS and paid plan and I expect 4+ days before hearing back from them. If/when are repos experience an issue we would be dead in the water. I have even tried calling their emergency contact number with no answer or call-back.
I've been worried about travis' lack of urgency in dealing with the fact that the existing travis-ci.org github hooks used for open source products are going to stop working in a week or two...
Interesting. All I can tell from Idea's homepage is that it likes to acquire companies: https://www.ideracorp.com. It looks like it's just a private equity firm (or the acquiring arm of one, since it's owned by TA Associates).
I've never heard of any of the software in Idera's brand portfolio. I wonder what the cultural change is like internally at a company joining the umbrella of a private equity firm.
All my ex coworkers at Sencha have been "promoted" then immediately laid off after the acquisition (2-3 months). Their business model is to milk long term support contracts, I wouldn't expect Travis to be relevant anymore (if it was before).
Yeah, one of their "brands" is also called Idera, and I worked there for many years prior to the acquisition. But, yeah, just shortly prior to the acquisition, most of the dev group were let go to improve the bottom line, and a small group of 4 or 5 devs were kept and promoted to manage an outsourced team in some other country to continue developing the products. The atmosphere post acquisition was different, though, being at the company while it was growing, the culture also shifted as we grew from scrappy startup to "we are now in a high rise office tower" corporation.
My last job was for a small company making a APM tool. We were bought by Idera and they fairly quickly laid off nearly everyone.
We were cautiously optimistic when the purchase happened. Idera had just purchased a pair of similar applications with different target audiences, so we thought the products would stick around and there would be a lot of work to do integrating everything. We were right about that (they're all still separately available) but Idera didn't have us in mind to work on it.
Our PM went to Idera's offices and found that it was basically a sales centre and that all the development was outsourced. A week or so later they came and laid off a third of the company. Within 3 months of the purchase, the only employees left were our PM, 2 sales reps, and 2 support.
I can't speak to the software, but I don't like the chances of anyone employed by Travis.
Curious to what this means for the Berlin tech scene in general. Travis was certainly one of the trailblazers and a high visibility local startup (next to probably Soundcloud).
Yes, I have fond memories of hanging out in their offices above beta house. Amazingly welcoming bunch of people and one of the best things about the Berlin tech scene for me. Hope it works out well for them. I know they were never in it for the money but they deserve a decent payout for their years of commitment.
And with that I declare this product dead... Idera is the last stop to squeeze cash out of a company.
Expect layoffs and all future work to be outsourced via fixed cost development to lowest bidders (mostly in India). Also expect a big sales push for multi year contracts.
Nothing wrong with India, just that companies like Idea don't like to have developers on payroll, and the ones that do write specs all day long.
Lots of mention of CircleCI and Gitlab as the reason for Travis' downfall, which is very true. I also think GitHub announcing GitHub Actions[1] may have been the final nail in the coffin.
I think GitHub Actions will become a major force in the CI market in short order, it has so many things going for it
a) Everyone already has an account and lots of code already lives there. One less extra thing to worry about.
b) I trust MS/GitHub with my Cloud secrets more than I trust the various other CI providers.
c) The financial backing of MS to provide a significant free tier
d) The fact that actions can so easily be shared on GitHub is a killer feature. More are more projects/companies will build actions for their end users.
The first startup I was at was acquired by Idera. They started by trying to replace everyone in the dev team with remote contractors. I cashed out and left as soon as possible.
I would have loved to paid Travis CI for my personal private repositories I wanted to kept private, that I push to maybe 1-2 times a night on a good week. Setup is a breeze, interface is simple and straight to the point, integration works. But they priced their "Ideal for hobbyist projects" plan way out of budget for any hobbyist who just wants somewhere to run some code. $70 a month!? Make it $15, maybe $20 and you got yourself an annual subscriber.
Loved Travis support over the years. I wish them the best.
Though lately ruby-travis cli has been broken for me on Arch, and with their YAML changes & associated complexity... I'm starting to look forward to Github actions.
Lots of issues with Travis CI feature velocity as well. Most of the other pain points others have mentioned I have felt. Random build failures, network issues, and etc.
A particular issue is the PR merge-commit builds. Between stages a merge/push into master can change the merge-commit! This means code between stages can diverge. You may build an artifact in one stage, then run an out-of-date test suite against it in another. Known issue for years, had an employee acknowledge months ago on the community forum then.. Nothing.
Another pain point that is not unique to Travis, is the lack of true "pipelines". Inter-project builds are a complete DIY crap fest. Coupled with roll-your-own artifact storage and retrieval.. Self-hosted solutions like Bamboo and TeamCity(Bamboos superior IMHO) are light years ahead of the SaaS solutions I've viewed.
Test report analysis is another big feature missing from most. Would be good to be able to visualize and report on tests. I was almost considering this being a valid stand-alone SaaS idea because nobody has it!
I believe the future of our integration/system tests will be build on codepipelines or the like for scale. Travis or CircleCI will be the public facing component.
As a Sencha user that has gone through Idera acquiring a product I use, don't count on any product development or meaningful support coming out of them
Their model seems to be farming out choosing canned replies to the cheapest labor they can find. Things that break will stay broken, no one they keep employed will actually know how anything works, let alone how to maintain it.
Looks like a lot of people are having troubles with Travis CI in this thread, we do too.
With so many competing CI services out there now, it's kind of hard to keep using Travis. They've added Windows support, which is great, but it's ridiculously slow. (a minute to run on Linux, 14 minutes on Windows). And with these slow downs, you quickly run into parallel build (I believe the limit is 3 builds per user).
For people coming to this thread looking for alternatives: I'm quite happy with Scrutinizer [1], especially for the easy setup and automatic code quality analysis.
Glad to hear that. Travis is also being used in my company and every build spawns a new virtual machine which takes almost a year to boot up. I heard good things about CircleCI. will give it a try asap.
The main problem with Travis was that is stayed with the CI part (as the name suggests) while people wanted a CI/CD solution that helps with deployments and monitoring as well.
F.D. I work for Codefresh a full CI/CD solution (competitor to TravisCI)
andrewl-hn|7 years ago
I didn't think of Travis in that regard, though in a past few month I started to see Circle CI badges popping here and there for opensource repositories and anecdotally many internal projects at companies are moving to GitLab and their built-in CI offering.
Probably a good time to sell the company, though I'd prefer if they would find a better buyer.
cheez|7 years ago
jrochkind1|7 years ago
Not totally sure why. Travis does what I need and I know how to use it, and I don't particularly want to learn something new for CI myself, I just want to code!
jherdman|7 years ago
dschep|7 years ago
Spartan-S63|7 years ago
manigandham|7 years ago
audiolion|7 years ago
floofy222|7 years ago
andrew_|7 years ago
I'd moved to Circle CI two years ago, and the only tasks/projects of mine still running on Travis are those which are deprecated, in suspended animation, or abandoned. For myself and my immediate peers, Travis is obsolete, and they did it to themselves. With Azure pipelines now a thing (and also far superior to Travis) I see another slow, slow death of a pioneering service.
danpalmer|7 years ago
This is sad, but the conclusion I have come to over the last 3-4 years as well. It was anybody's market 4 years ago, but through a sustained pace I think CircleCI have out-executed Travis consistently.
The thing I find interesting is that, looking at Semaphore CI who used to be far behind Travis, they are now biting at the heels of CircleCI with their 2.0 iteration. From what I understand they are not venture backed and are a smaller team, and yet their product is starting to look like a real competitor. To me this says that Travis just failed to execute well enough, rather than Circle having more money (although that helps).
eeeeeeeeeeeee|7 years ago
Circle was way ahead of Travis in their docker implementation. The Travis docker stuff always felt like a hack.
Once I started moving more projects to Circle, most of the developers on our team were much happier on Circle.
lars_francke|7 years ago
This is another homepage that already assumes that everyone knows what it does and is no help to people unfamiliar with it.
hinkley|7 years ago
bithavoc|7 years ago
Rapzid|7 years ago
jrochkind1|7 years ago
https://github.com/travis-ci/travis-ci/issues/9745
Now bought by a private equity firm, which usually doesn't indicate lots of innovation or an increase in quality on the way.
I wonder if I should be worried and start migrating my projects. I really liked travis for so long.
DrTorte|7 years ago
(Disclosure: Travis CI Employee)
The migration from GitHub hooks is actually just about complete. You can see the changelog entry here: https://changelog.travis-ci.com/migrating-from-github-servic...
Apologies for the lack of public updates on this!
throwawaymath|7 years ago
I've never heard of any of the software in Idera's brand portfolio. I wonder what the cultural change is like internally at a company joining the umbrella of a private equity firm.
luckydata|7 years ago
superqd|7 years ago
amcintosh16|7 years ago
We were cautiously optimistic when the purchase happened. Idera had just purchased a pair of similar applications with different target audiences, so we thought the products would stick around and there would be a lot of work to do integrating everything. We were right about that (they're all still separately available) but Idera didn't have us in mind to work on it.
Our PM went to Idera's offices and found that it was basically a sales centre and that all the development was outsourced. A week or so later they came and laid off a third of the company. Within 3 months of the purchase, the only employees left were our PM, 2 sales reps, and 2 support.
I can't speak to the software, but I don't like the chances of anyone employed by Travis.
mawburn|7 years ago
https://www.ideracorp.com/brands
and
https://www.ideracorp.com/news
tnolet|7 years ago
africajam|7 years ago
l5870uoo9y|7 years ago
mbrumlow|7 years ago
Expect layoffs and all future work to be outsourced via fixed cost development to lowest bidders (mostly in India). Also expect a big sales push for multi year contracts.
Nothing wrong with India, just that companies like Idea don't like to have developers on payroll, and the ones that do write specs all day long.
talawahtech|7 years ago
I think GitHub Actions will become a major force in the CI market in short order, it has so many things going for it
a) Everyone already has an account and lots of code already lives there. One less extra thing to worry about.
b) I trust MS/GitHub with my Cloud secrets more than I trust the various other CI providers.
c) The financial backing of MS to provide a significant free tier
d) The fact that actions can so easily be shared on GitHub is a killer feature. More are more projects/companies will build actions for their end users.
1. https://github.com/features/actions
krn1p4n1c|7 years ago
dewski|7 years ago
hendry|7 years ago
Though lately ruby-travis cli has been broken for me on Arch, and with their YAML changes & associated complexity... I'm starting to look forward to Github actions.
Rapzid|7 years ago
A particular issue is the PR merge-commit builds. Between stages a merge/push into master can change the merge-commit! This means code between stages can diverge. You may build an artifact in one stage, then run an out-of-date test suite against it in another. Known issue for years, had an employee acknowledge months ago on the community forum then.. Nothing.
Another pain point that is not unique to Travis, is the lack of true "pipelines". Inter-project builds are a complete DIY crap fest. Coupled with roll-your-own artifact storage and retrieval.. Self-hosted solutions like Bamboo and TeamCity(Bamboos superior IMHO) are light years ahead of the SaaS solutions I've viewed.
Test report analysis is another big feature missing from most. Would be good to be able to visualize and report on tests. I was almost considering this being a valid stand-alone SaaS idea because nobody has it!
I believe the future of our integration/system tests will be build on codepipelines or the like for scale. Travis or CircleCI will be the public facing component.
mhd|7 years ago
resca79|7 years ago
Thanks for the contribute to the open source projects!
samblr|7 years ago
jarvuschris|7 years ago
Their model seems to be farming out choosing canned replies to the cheapest labor they can find. Things that break will stay broken, no one they keep employed will actually know how anything works, let alone how to maintain it.
xPaw|7 years ago
With so many competing CI services out there now, it's kind of hard to keep using Travis. They've added Windows support, which is great, but it's ridiculously slow. (a minute to run on Linux, 14 minutes on Windows). And with these slow downs, you quickly run into parallel build (I believe the limit is 3 builds per user).
yhoiseth|7 years ago
1. https://scrutinizer-ci.com/
m00dy|7 years ago
i386|7 years ago
awill|7 years ago
yingw787|7 years ago
kkapelon|7 years ago
F.D. I work for Codefresh a full CI/CD solution (competitor to TravisCI)
lumengxi|7 years ago
sitkack|7 years ago