I finally switched over to a hosted ci service last week. I am beyond happy with the new setup. Hours spent toiling away configuring jenkins and its many plugins are no more.
No more trying to get janky setup either. It seemed that I wasn’t able to use janky without creating a github organization. The janky github user needed admin permissions on the repository, and it didn’t seem we were able to do this without creating an organization and placing the repo under that organization. Unfortunately we couldn’t do that without upgrading to the github business plan, which is something we plan on doing soon anyway, but regardless it was still another hurdle.
The service I chose was circle ci. I logged in via github and was running my tests in seconds. The only thing I had to really do was specify ruby 2.0.0 in my gemfile to make sure the tests were running on ruby 2.
I’m not trying to drink too much saas kool aid here, but this really seemed like a great win. So my question to anyone managing Jenkins themselves is, why not use a hosted service? It is cheaper than paying your engineers to manage a ci system. Is there anything Jenkins provides that a hosted solution cannot?