Travis-CI is a distributed continuous integration platform that integrates well with projects on Github. As many of our projects are taking advantage of our Github integration, they're also making use of Travis-CI for testing of inbound patches.

Travis CI offers a free account for open source projects, with a built in assumption that projects are generally a single project per Github organization. The level of resources and jobs able to run is 'fair use', which is fair indeed considering that is gratis.

Of course, most Github organizations aren't as large as the Apache organization on Github, and we recently discovered that the Foundation was one of the largest gratis open source user of Travis CI. On average, our build queue length was in excess of 300 jobs. While we appreciate the generosity of the Travis-CI folks, our demand for their services was clearly outstripping the available supply. This also meant that a lot of Apache projects were frustrated, or even abandoning their efforts to use Travis-CI because the length of time for a build to start was high enough to not really quality as 'continuous'.

To that end, we've now purchased a subscription to Travis services, and have moved from 'fair use' to having 30 concurrent builds. This should be a dramatic increase in throughput for Apache projects who make use of Travis.