Heya, I'd like to take the community temperature on migrating our build infra from the ci-hbase.a.o Jenkins instance to something built on GitHub Actions. I have several reasons that justify this proposal.
As some of you may know, our community funding has reduced and we will no longer be able to sustain the current fleet of build infrastructure. So, one motivation for this proposal is cost-cutting: I think that we'll be able to operate at lower costs if we can migrate to a provisioned-as-needed model of consumption. My second reason is an optimistic appeal to a larger contributor base. I suspect that if we can modernize our infrastructure then we will increase the pool of contributors who might be able to participate in this area. I believe that GH Actions (and systems like it) is more prevalent in the industry than Jenkins, which means that more people already have experience with the platform and more people will feel compelled to offer support to an OSS project that uses the platform as a means of growing their own skillset and as a means of bolstering their CVs. Dove-tailed into reason two is reason three: I believe that there is a large community of folks who are developing GitHub Actions on its marketplace. We would effectively open ourselves up to more off-the-shelf offerings and those offerings would be in our hands directly. By contrast, I don't think there's as much development in Jenkins plugins, and the process of adding a new plugin to our Jenkins instance requires filing an INFRA ticket. These are my motivations. I'm still not clear on what's possible yet for ASF projects. I have filed an INFRA ticket, requesting whatever is necessary for us to start an experiment. Indeed, I believe that there are some major limitations on the current implementation provided by the ASF, and as far as I can tell, only one project with a build footprint that resembles HBase has pursued this effort. I've catalogued the applicable information that I've found so far on that issue. https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/INFRA-26170 Thanks, Nick
