I've been working for the last 5 years on an alternative called Dagger. Ended up building a company around it.
We started from the ideal state of CI, and set out to build the platform that would support that.
For us this ideal state of CI boils down to 4 things:
- local-first (local execution should be a first-class citizen, with no exception)
- repeatable (the same inputs should yield the same output, with affordances for handling inevitable side effects in an explicit and pragmatic way)
- programmable. my workflows are software. I want all the convenience of a modern software development experience: types, IDE support, a rich system API
, debugging tools, an ecosystem of reusable components, etc.
- observable. I want all the information in one place about everything that happened in my workflow, with good tooling to get the information I need quickly, and interop with the existing observability ecosystem (eg. open telemetry)
So Dagger is our best effort at a CI platform focused on those 4 things.
Sorry if this comes across as a sales pitch. When
you're building solves a problem you're obsessed with, it's hard to discuss the problem without also mentioning the solution that seems the most obvious to you :)
We started from the ideal state of CI, and set out to build the platform that would support that.
For us this ideal state of CI boils down to 4 things:
- local-first (local execution should be a first-class citizen, with no exception)
- repeatable (the same inputs should yield the same output, with affordances for handling inevitable side effects in an explicit and pragmatic way)
- programmable. my workflows are software. I want all the convenience of a modern software development experience: types, IDE support, a rich system API , debugging tools, an ecosystem of reusable components, etc.
- observable. I want all the information in one place about everything that happened in my workflow, with good tooling to get the information I need quickly, and interop with the existing observability ecosystem (eg. open telemetry)
So Dagger is our best effort at a CI platform focused on those 4 things.
Sorry if this comes across as a sales pitch. When you're building solves a problem you're obsessed with, it's hard to discuss the problem without also mentioning the solution that seems the most obvious to you :)