Building a CI/CD Pipeline Runner from Scratch in Python

Why does air-gapped environment require rolling your own CI/CD solution? Plenty of examples of air-gapped Jenkins and/or Argo Workflows. Was this just an educational exercise?

This was more like an educational exercise

Since you're exercising, you can take it to the next level where you don't specify the next step but the inputs to each task, allowing you to infer the DAG and implement caching...

You can do this with cue/flow, but have not turned it into a full CI system. The building blocks are there

Jenkins sucks but is insanely reliable

Argo Workflows does not live up to what they advertise, it is so much more complex to setup and then build workflows for. Helm + Argo is pain (both use the same template delimiters...)

It seems like a simple CI/CD in an airgapped environment might be simpler to implement than to (1) learn and (2) onboard an off-the-shelf solution when your airgapped requirement limits your ability to leverage the off-the-shelf ecosystem.

Never heard of cue/flow will definitely check it out

Jenkins, like many tools with extreme flexibility, sucks as much as you make it suck. You can pretty easily turn Jenkins into a monstrosity that makes everyone afraid to ever try to update it. On the other hand, you can also have a pretty solid setup that is easy to work on. The trouble is that the tool itself doesn't guide you much to the good path, so unless you've seen a pleasant Jenkins instance before you're likely to have a worse time than necessary.

Are you sure, because last time I used Jenkins it actively sucked. The interface was a total mess and it doesn't surface results in any useful way.

When was the last time you used Jenkins? I don't get the hate. Not only from you, but lots of people on the internet. What makes Jenkins stand out IMO is the community and the core maintainers, they are perhaps moving slow, but they are moving in the right directions. The interface looks really nice now, they've done a lot of ux improvements lately.

What particular issues do you have with it? My company uses it at scale (dozens of different instances, hundreds of workers, thousands of pipelines) to support thousands of applications and we are reasonably happy with it. DSL is incredibly helpful at scale. IAC is incredibly helpful at scale. It requires a good amount of upkeep, but all things underpinning large amounts of infrastructure require a good amount of upkeep.