The Software Miniture is a concept that I came up with when experimenting with code generation. Its a cut down version of a larger application with a  minimal implementation of the concepts of a larger application. The idea was to perform experiments on the miniture that would be much faster than on the full application.

This idea also seems to be useful when chosing a replacement CI server.

2017 comes with the decommissioning of two cloud ci providers.

Snap-CI and Bamboo-CI are both shutting down.

Snap-ci provided a build pipeline (triggered by a github webhook) with log and artefact viewing. This was all configured using a clean UI which allowed environment variables to be stored as either plaintext or securely.

Finding a replacement is not simple. The options seem to include options without a ui to specify the pipelines or are much more expensive.

The roll your own optiona are complex possibly including docker hosted travis.