Blacksmith, a Y Combinator-backed company selling faster, cheaper GitHub Actions runners, writes on CI, caching, and multitenancy economics.
HN commenters name it as an alternative to slow GitHub Actions, though one notes it had several outages in a week.
GitHub Actions started off great as they were quickly iterating, but it very much seems that GitHub has taken its eye of the ball and the improvements have all but halted.
It's really upsetting how little attention Actions is getting these days (<https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/categories/actions?discussions_q=is%3Aopen+category%3AActions+sort%3Atop> tells the story -- the most popular issues have gone completely unanswered).
Sad to see Earthly halting development and Dagger jumping on the AI train :(. Hopefully we'll get a proper alternative.
On a related note, if you're considering https://www.blacksmith.sh/, you really should consider https://depot.dev/. We evaluated both but went with Depot because the team is insanely smart and they've solved some pretty neat challenges. One of the cooler features is that their caching works with the default actions/cache action. There's absolutely no need to switch out popular third party actions in favor of patched ones.
blacksmith.sh just raised tens of millions on the core premise that self-hosting CI/CD is hard [0].
they've had multiple outages in the last week, so i guess they are proving themselves correct.
in practice, giving ssh/sudo to AI (codex) and telling it to setup ephemeral runners on your own host VM, takes about 30 minutes and works extremely well. it bangs out all the shell scripts. moved my own business over to it. zero problems.
[0] https://www.blacksmith.sh/blog/blacksmith-seed-announcement
> You have 5 days before the new DockerHub limits f*ck you over.
How classy from a somewhat DockerHub competitor: https://www.blacksmith.sh/pricing
I guess only they are allowed to make money, not Docker.
there are a couple and have very good reputation - though I've never used them
https://www.blacksmith.sh/ and https://runs-on.com/
They also say that they're much cheaper than github
This is basically the premise of https://www.blacksmith.sh/ as far as I know, though without the need to host the hardware yourself and the potential complexity they comes with that.
Related: Github Actions control plane is no longer free https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46291500 https://www.blacksmith.sh/blog/actions-pricing