Practical articles on AI, DevOps, Cloud, Linux, and infrastructure engineering.
We ran the same test suite on both platforms for a year. Here's where CircleCI earns its price, where GitHub Actions wins on simplicity, and what the bill actually looks like.
We've run both in anger. Here's the honest breakdown of maintenance, cost, and flexibility, plus when Jenkins still earns its keep.
A production-focused GitHub Actions guide: reusable workflows, least-privilege permissions, keyless OIDC to the cloud, SHA-pinned actions, environments with approvals, concurrency-safe deploys, and CodeQL/Dependabot gates — with copy-paste examples.
We've shipped production pipelines on both. Here's where GitHub Actions wins, where GitLab CI wins, and how to pick without regretting it in six months.
We had the same 180-line build workflow copy-pasted into 60 repos. Fixing one bug meant 60 PRs. Here's the reusable-workflow setup that made it one.
We rotated a leaked AWS access key that a workflow had committed to logs. Switching GitHub Actions to OIDC federation meant no static AWS keys exist to leak in the first place.
Most CI caches either miss constantly or restore stale junk. The cache-key discipline, scope boundaries, and measurements that turned our pipeline cache from theatre into real minutes saved.
Production monitoring catches user-facing issues. CI failures stay invisible until someone notices the merge queue is stuck. The metrics and alerts that make pipelines observable.
Walk through a working GitHub Actions workflow — install, test, build, deploy — for a tiny Node app. Every line explained.
We launched Backstage in October. Six months in, 80% of services are catalogued, on-boarding takes a third of the time, and we mostly know what owns what.
Bills hit $3,400/mo for runner minutes. We moved to self-hosted on EKS spot. The savings were real; the surprises were too.
Every hook on this list caught a bug or a security issue in the last twelve months. The configs are short. The savings have been considerable.
