Switching costs are now a regulatory concern
The EU Data Act and cloud portability
The EU Data Act targets lock-in directly, requiring providers to remove obstacles to switching. What that means for CI.
Most cloud regulation is about where data sits. The EU Data Act is unusual because it is substantially about whether you can leave — it requires providers to remove commercial, technical and contractual obstacles to switching, and phases out the egress charges that made moving expensive.
Why CI is an awkward case
CI platforms rarely hold data you need to extract — the source of truth is your repository. The lock-in is different in kind: it is the accumulated workflow configuration, the custom actions, the cache topology and the runner labels scattered across hundreds of YAML files.
A platform that required you to rewrite your steps, adopt its own action syntax or restructure your caching has locked you in far more effectively than one holding a database, and it never had to charge an egress fee to do it.
The test worth applying
| Question | Low lock-in | High lock-in |
|---|---|---|
| What did you change to adopt it? | One line | Every workflow file |
| Proprietary action syntax? | None — standard actions | Vendor-specific steps |
| Cache portable? | actions/cache compatible | Proprietary API |
| Time to migrate away | Minutes | A quarter |
| Egress or exit fees | None | Per-GB extraction charges |
Where we stand
Our integration surface is the runs-on label, and the cache is actions/cache compatible rather than a proprietary API. That is not principally a compliance posture — it is what stops us retaining customers through switching costs instead of through being faster and cheaper.
jobs: build:- runs-on: runnerhut-8vcpu-ubuntu-2404-eu-central+ runs-on: ubuntu-latestSources
- Regulation (EU) 2023/2854 (Data Act) — https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reg/2023/2854/oj
Your next build could be twice as fast, at half the price
Start free. Migrating away is the same one line, and we publish that diff too.