Case studies / RaceIQ
From hosted CI to hardware already on hand.
RaceIQ is a free, open-source sim racing app with live telemetry and lap analysis. As the project grew, it found room to run more CI jobs without additional hosting spend.
The challenge
A growing test suite on an open-source budget.
As RaceIQ added features and tests, its CI usage exhausted GitHub's free tier. For a free open-source app without revenue, paying for CI raised a difficult question.
Blacksmith offered more free usage, delaying the CI cost problem, but its allowance was still insufficient. The projected monthly cost remained significant.
The path to MARS
From hosted allowances to making more of the machines already available.
- 01
Growth
More features and tests exhausted GitHub's free tier.
- 02
Hosted CI
Blacksmith provided more free usage, but not enough for RaceIQ's needs.
- 03
Own hardware
RaceIQ's founder turned to spare computers and set up MARS.
- 04
Optimization
Job telemetry revealed requested resources alongside actual usage.
The cost context
The hosted alternative, estimated.
Estimated cost for the same monthly usage, not actual spending or guaranteed savings. Self-hosting still has hardware and energy costs.
- Blacksmith
- $300 / month
- GitHub
- $20,000 / month
The MARS approach
Use the computers already on hand.
Native GitHub self-hosted runners were inconvenient. MARS was easy to set up and avoided the infrastructure management a Kubernetes route would require.
It allowed more than one job to run concurrently on each machine. Telemetry shows each job's requested resources alongside actual usage, helping RaceIQ optimize resources and run more concurrent jobs on the same hardware.
The outcome
More use from the same hardware.
Using its own hardware means no additional CI hosting spend. GitHub can charge for caching, but RaceIQ gets a free speedup for its Turborepo setup from package and build caches without cache charges. RaceIQ also found that AI analysis just works.
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