The build server at our company sucks. The build agents (there are a dozen of them, each is a separate VM, and apparently they are all living on their own ESX server) are SLOW. The web interface is SLOW and is running on a Windows VM, also on ESX. Everything is SLOW, SLOW, SLOW. Artifact upload sometimes fails for unknown reasons. Sometimes the web interface reports in the UI that it has run out of memory and it seizes up then crashes. It seems like IT is rebooting it at least once every day. Today they are rolling back a minor update because it has caused problems.Currently IT owns the hardware that the build servers run on and we have zero visibility into that. We do have admin control over the software. We (the developers) are constantly complaining about it but nothing seems to really improve. Does it make sense for developers to own the build server(s)? IT doesn't really have as much incentive to make them reliable and fast as developers do. In order to get IT to fix the problems we have to complain to our managers and then they have to talk to their managers who then tell IT to fix it. We can report problems to IT directly but that just doesn't seem to work to get things fixed because IT has lots of other things they need to deal with. Also, the developers are the ones who are actually using the build system and are probably a lot more familiar with it than IT.How does it work at other companies?We are about a 150 person company. So probably half of that is engineering, but a third of that is probably hardware, so we have maybe 40 or so devs.
Should developers own the build server(s)?
continuous integration;build system