Why hasn't anybody started a hosted continuous integration service?

Question

There's a dozen services that provide hosted version control, hosted ticket tracking, hosted project management, and combinations of all of the above, there's even hosted web-based IDEs. But nobody's yet offered a hosted continuous integration service; at least that I can find. The concept seems simple enough: I register and provide the URL to my source code repository, it grabs my code and builds it via ant/rake/whatever, then runs the suite of tests and some metrics (code coverage, performance, etc.). Is there some prohibitive barrier to entry I'm not considering?

Answer 1

The most immediate problem with such a service would be actually estimating the CPU needed - build services is potentially unbounded, especially when you need to cater for a large multitude of types of projects. There are also potential security issues.

And for a large variety of projects to work properly, you'd probably need a pretty big staff.

Answer 2

So, two comments.

1. People apparently do offer hosted CI services. http://www.google.com/search?q=hosted+continuous+integration

2. In general, it's a much tougher sell for hosted CI because it's something that's VERY hard on the CPU and disk (much more so than web hosting, for example), so it's going to need to be priced differently. It's also extremely niche, which means it's probably not worth the hassle.

Answer 3

Hum...

You could install one continuous integration server by yourselft if you buy a VPS, but I understand your point. You want something out of the box. The challenges that I see:

1. how to deals with the multitude of languages/environments/frameworks/databases/operational systems/etc
2. how to handle local dependencies
3. how to handle with intensive cpu usage (with builds that starts some kind of load test or whatever)
4. how to keep large history of huge generated artifacts.

Sure, some points (3 and 4) already have solutions like Amazon Web Services, Google App Engine and others.

Kind Regards

Answer 4

Good question. Relevance is launching just such a service soon:

http://runcoderun.com

Drop by and have a look around. We'll be making more public announcements soon.

Answer 5

In addition to RunCodeRun recommended by @jgehtland I also discovered Devver (http://devver.net) which also, sadly, is still in private beta.

Answer 6

The previous posters forgot to specify that

• runcoderun.com does work only with GIT repositories from github.com
• devver.net does work only for Ruby projects.

Answer 7

For Java teams you might also want to look at Mike also in private beta.

There is also a recent blog post from the Build Doctor discussing a few alternatives, from DIY amazon AMIs (CI in a box) to a bespoke service (CI Foundry) and exisitng providers such as Run Code Run.

Answer 8

There also the CodeBetter TeamCity server if your project is open source.

Answer 9

A quick update about Mike. We are soon to release support for Ruby/Rake

Answer 10

My employer, Atlassian, offers hosted continuous integration using EC2 as part of the JIRA Studio suite.

Answer 11

You could use Amazons Elastic Cloud Computing infrastructure. Several continous integration solutions already support easy configuration for build on EC2. And it is an interesting way for many projects, as you only need to pay for the computing power/time you really need. And it is easy scale-able.

Answer 12

Try fazend.com, it's a free hosted continuous integration platform, for PHP, Java, Ruby, Perl, etc. projects. In addition to CI it includes SVN and Trac.