On Mon, 21 Aug 2023, Dan Fandrich via curl-library wrote:
They have an easy-to-use credit-card entry form for us to buy credits, but it looks to me like that would cost us almost $3500 per month (presumably USD).
I am prepared to pay for services we use and rely on, but that's simply not a reasonable fee.
Another option is to rent one or more virtual servers somewhere and hook them up to Cirrus CI for only $10 per month. To replace our current usage would require at least 8 virtual servers, though, so still several hundred dollars per month.
Also, running our own servers for CI jobs means that someone (of us) needs to do the job of setting it up and maintaining them going forward.
Finally, we could migrate all but the FreeBSD jobs to one of the CI services still offering a reasonable free tier (Azure and GHA). We can almost squeeze in our FreeBSD builds within our the Cirrus CI monthly credits, and I'm not aware of another CI service that offers FreeBSD servers, so that's probably the cheapest way forward. But it probably means more latency and slower build results as we load the other services even more.
First: I don't think the FreeBSD CI jobs are *crucial*. We can still do very well without them. Yes we do even better *with* them, but we rarely find problems using these. In fact, the FreeBSD jobs themselves are very often problematic and many times they've caused more friction to the team than they actually helped. This because of FreeBSD peculiarities rather than curl issues.
It is possible to plug in your own "runners" in other CI systems. I've seen writeups on how people do Open/Free/NetBSD builds on GHA using VMs for example. It is also possible to hook up build-bots in other ways. Meaning: Cirrus CI is not our only option to do FreeBSD CI jobs, but it is probably one of the easier.
On GitHub/Azure I believe we already have extra powers (above the normal free tier) and I think there is a chance we could get more sponsored if we actually end up in problems on the current level.
I think we should start out by migrating the non-FreeBSD jobs away from Cirrus and see how that runs. We can then also drop one of the two FreeBSD jobs to half the CPU load, as they are so similar anyway they are likely to always run into the same issues.
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