Wikando: ~$563 to ~$136 in CI compute, builds 23 to 15 minutes
Wikando, the company behind FundraisingBox, moved off GitHub-hosted runners to RunsOn in its own AWS account: CI compute down ~75%, main CI 23 to 15 minutes.
- ~$563 → ~$136 monthly CI compute
- 23 → 15 min main repository CI
- 20 → 5 min heavy analysis on 16 threads
- Company
- Wikando · Fundraising software for non-profits, Augsburg
- Before
- GitHub-hosted runners, 2 and 4 cores
- After
- RunsOn, in an isolated AWS account
- Source
- In Timo Schäfer's own words (Software Engineer), March 13, 2024
About Wikando#
Wikando is the Augsburg company behind FundraisingBox ↗, fundraising software for associations, foundations and NGOs: donation forms and campaigns, a donor CRM, payment processing, and connectors to tools like Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics. The company dates back to 2007 and has built FundraisingBox since 2010.
Wikando moved its CI from GitHub-hosted runners to RunsOn in early 2024.
What hurt#
The goal was money. Wikando had budgeted $300 a month for GitHub Actions, and the bill had grown to nearly $600.
Speed was the other problem. Their jobs ran on GitHub’s ubuntu-latest and 4-core runners, and the team did not like what they got: even the 4-core runner ran their dockerized test suite slower than late-2010s Intel i5 MacBook Pros running the same tests. Larger GitHub runners were out of the question at that price for that performance.
Why RunsOn#
Before RunsOn, the team looked at two other ways out:
- Self-hosting ephemeral runners with one of the existing controller projects for GitHub Actions.
- Moving to GitLab altogether.
Timo came across RunsOn during that search and pitched it internally. The licensing terms made it easy to get approval for an evaluation.
What sold the team once they tried it was choosing the machine per job. They already knew which of their CI tools use extra vCPUs and which run fine on a single-CPU burstable instance. With RunsOn they could put that knowledge into the workflow labels, and save on time as well as cost.
Results#
The comparison below uses one month of their usage: 21,453 minutes on 2-CPU runners and 24,455 minutes on 4-CPU runners.
- ~$563 on GitHub-hosted runners, ~$136 for compute on RunsOn: about 75% less, before counting spot or burstable instances.
- Main repository: CI down from 23 to 15 minutes on average.
- One heavy analysis job: 20 minutes down to 5, on 16 threads. Beyond 16, the gains flattened out, so they stayed there.
What comes next#
At Wikando, the savings mostly make the finance team happy. For engineers, the win is shorter cycle times: every CI run that finishes eight minutes sooner shortens the wait on a code review.
The monetary savings are huge, don't get me wrong, but those mainly make our finance department happy. I'm wholly convinced RunsOn will help us deliver software to our customers faster by reducing software cycle times.
Timo Schäfer Software Engineer, Wikando