Narayana has been tested through Jenkins for a very long time. While this testing environment has served the core team well enough, it comes with several drawbacks:

• Narayana's Jenkins instance runs behind a VPN, making test results inaccessible to the community.
  • The core team has to manually report PR results to community users.
• Because Jenkins is behind a VPN, the test-triggering infrastructure is redundant and overly complex.
• The poor integration between the internal Jenkins instance and GitHub leads to dozens (sometimes hundreds) of messages from Jenkins reporting test results.
  • These messages clutter discussions between authors and reviewers, making conversations difficult to follow.
  • Old messages become outdated and add no value to the PR; manually deleting or hiding them is time-consuming.
• The current Jenkins infrastructure does not easily support Docker-in-Docker (DinD), making it impossible to use Testcontainers in Narayana’s codebase. As a result, setting up databases (needed for certain test axes) becomes another pain point for the team.

For these reasons, GitHub (GH) Actions seems to be a great alternative to Narayana's current testing environment. Moreover, GH Actions has improved significantly since Tom’s initial attempt to adopt this technology. In fact, all the drawbacks mentioned above can be addressed with GH Actions.