alt Hacker NewsOne thing I'd love to see is dynamic CPU allocation or otherwise something similar to Jenkin's concept of a flyweight runner. Certain pipelines can often spend minutes to hours using zero CPU just polling for completion (e.g. CloudFormation, hosted E2E tests, etc.) In these cases I'd be charged for 2 vCPUs but use almost nothing.
Otherwise, the customers are stuck with the same sizing/packing/utilisation problems. And imagine being the CI vendor in this world: you know which pipeline steps use what resources on average (and at the p99), and with that information you could over-provision customer jobs so that you sell 20 vCPUs but schedule them on 10 vCPUs. 200% utilisation baby!
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I'm sure they're doing this, they'd be mad not to - firecracker has cgroup support.
i think cloudflare workers does this
I had a service that was used to do a bunch of compute at deployment time but even with the ramp up in deployment rates anticipated by the existence of the tool, we had machines that were saturated about 6 hours a month, 12 at the outside. The amount of hardware we has sitting around for this was initially equivalent to about 10% of our primary cluster, and I got it down to about 3%.
But at the end of that project I realized that all this work could have been done on a CI agent if only they had more compute on them. My little cluster was still almost the size of the build agent pool tended to be. If I could convince them to double or quadruple the instance size on the CI pipeline I could turn these machines off entirely, which would be a lower total cost at 2x and only a 30% increase at 4, especially since some builds would go faster resulting in less autoscaling.
So if one other team could also eliminate a similar service, it would be a huge win. I unfortunately did not get to finish that thought due to yet another round of layoffs.