First-time evaluator - what metrics should I track for a PoC?

You need to measure time. That's the business case. Clock everything from commit to deployment in your current Jenkins setup as a baseline. Then run the same pipeline in the PoC and compare.

Track these as hard numbers:
* Pipeline duration (wall clock)
* Developer time spent configuring/maintaining the pipeline
* Failed build rate and mean time to recovery (MTTR)
* Infrastructure cost per pipeline run on AWS

Your "ease of use" guess is vague. Quantify it. How many clicks or lines of config to achieve the same outcome? How long does it take a new dev to onboard?

Don't forget lock-in. Can you export the pipeline config as code? If the SaaS disappears tomorrow, are you stranded?

Agree on the time metrics. Add one more: "time to first successful run" for a new pipeline. That's where SaaS platforms either shine or waste a week of your life.

> How many clicks or lines of config
Be careful with lines of config. Verbose YAML might still be easier to reason with than a proprietary UI where you can't find the setting. The format and readability matter more than the count.

Lock-in is the real killer. Ask if their pipeline definitions are pure, versionable code (like a `*.yml` file in your repo) or if they're stored in their UI database. The latter is a hard no.

Track your own time, not just the pipeline's. Every hour you burn on their learning curve or quirks during the PoC is an hour you'd spend monthly if you adopt it.

Beyond the config format, test how you debug when it fails. Do you get actionable logs fast, or do you have to open a support ticket? That's your future MTTR.

For security, verify the integration points: how does it handle your AWS credentials? Can it run in a private VPC or is everything on the public internet?

Great point about tracking your own time. I'd add that you should also note the cognitive load for each hiccup. Like, did you spend 15 minutes searching docs or was the error message clear enough to fix it in two? That difference adds up fast.

Also, on the security part, ask if they support temporary credentials (like assuming an IAM role). If they're storing long-lived keys, that's a big red flag for me.

Absolutely right about cognitive load. It's one of those hidden costs that can turn a "five minute fix" into a half-day scavenger hunt.

>did you spend 15 minutes searching docs
This is where a good community or knowledge base is invaluable. During your PoC, check if you can easily find help. A platform with sparse or outdated docs means you'll be paying that 15-minute tax over and over.

On the temporary credentials, that's crucial. It's a solid test of a platform's security maturity. A "no" there should be a deal-breaker unless they have a very compelling and documented alternative.

Totally feel this. I had one PoC where the error was just "build failed," and the docs were a maze of outdated screenshots. I lost an entire afternoon.

A great community is a lifesaver. For our current tool, I've solved so many weird issues just by searching their forum and finding someone else's post. If a platform lacks that, it makes every small problem feel isolating and expensive.

And yes on temporary credentials! It's one of those binary things. If they don't support it, it often means they don't really get modern cloud security. It's not just a red flag, it's a showstopper for me now.

Everyone else covered the core metrics, but you're thinking about this backwards. You're a Node shop with Terraform. Your metric should be "how many Terraform resources did I need to create just to run a basic pipeline?"

If the PoC requires you to build half an AWS VPC, manage IAM policies across three services, and deploy a lambda just to handle webhooks, you've already lost. The platform should be a consumer of your existing infrastructure, not a project that doubles your IaC footprint. Time the setup from zero to a green build using your actual AWS account and Terraform modules. If it takes more than two hours, the operational overhead will kill you.

For security, ignore their marketing. Try to break their isolation model. Spin up two pipelines in the same PoC organization, one for a clean app and one that tries to exfiltrate secrets from the other. See if they can touch each other. I've seen multi-tenant runners leak environment variables because the vendor just slapped `securityGroups` on an EC2 fleet and called it a day.

That point about the community solving weird issues is so true. I've been lurking for a while, and I've noticed the same thing in my own PoCs for support tools.

>it makes every small problem feel isolating and expensive.

This clicks for me. It's not just about time, it's about friction for the whole team. If a junior dev hits a cryptic error on a Saturday, a strong community or knowledge base means they might solve it themselves instead of pinging you.

For the temporary credentials, have you ever seen a platform that *says* they support them, but the implementation is so clunky it's practically unusable? I'm worried about checking that box without seeing how it actually works in a real pipeline.

>note the cognitive load for each hiccup
Yes. This is the hidden cost most PoCs miss. You can have great wall-clock times but still burn a week of engineer sanity on opaque errors.

On temporary credentials, the red flag is if they don't support them at all. But the bigger trap is when they support it only for their own compute, while their UI and control plane still require a permanent key. That's not zero-trust, that's just moving the risk around.

Exactly this. I call it the "infrastructure tax." If your pipeline tool requires you to manage its own cloud primitives, you've just bought another infrastructure team to babysit it.

>Time the setup from zero to a green build using your actual AWS account and Terraform modules.
Do this twice. Once with a fresh account and once by integrating into your existing, messy, production AWS account with all its guardrails and naming conventions. The delta between those two times is your true onboarding pain. A good platform should have almost no difference.

The isolation test is brilliant, but take it further. Don't just try to exfiltrate from another pipeline; try to assume the IAM role of the shared compute. I've seen "isolated" runners where the vendor's EC2 instance profile was far too permissive, letting any pipeline in the org escalate to admin.

You're right to focus on cost, ease, use, and security. Those are foundational categories, but you need to translate them into measurable data your stakeholders can't ignore.

Quantify "ease of use" by logging all time spent outside of actual pipeline execution. This includes initial setup, configuration debugging, and searching for solutions. For a team of five, multiply any time you spend during the PoC by five to model future team-wide friction. Security isn't a checkbox. You must test the IAM integration in your actual AWS environment. If the platform requires a permanent access key, document that as a hard requirement for additional secret management and rotation overhead, which is a direct operational cost.

Don't forget exit velocity. Time how long it takes to tear down the PoC and return your AWS environment to its prior state. A platform that leaves orphaned resources or complex dependencies creates future technical debt. That's a measurable liability you can present against the projected time savings.

>multiply any time you spend during the PoC by five to model future team-wide friction

That's optimistic. In reality, every dev will hit a different obscure error. It's multiplicative, not linear. You'll spend five times longer just writing the runbook for their unique failures.

Exit velocity is a good theoretical metric, but I've never seen a PoC where they actually let you fully tear down. The sales rep always pushes for an "extended trial" to "gather more data." You're stuck with their junk in your account for months.

The real metric is how many support tickets you have to open to get rid of it.

You're thinking about this like a checklist. That's a trap. The real metric for any SaaS CI/CD tool is how much of your own infrastructure they offload versus how much they make you babysit anyway.

With your Node and Terraform setup, you'll want to track how many vendor-specific resources you have to jam into your IaC. If the PoC requires you to write a new module just to provision their "runner agent" or "control plane proxy", you're not moving off Jenkins, you're just adding a second, more expensive platform with less control.

Time how long it takes to get a *production-like* pipeline running. That means using your real AWS account with its security groups and IAM boundaries, not a fresh sandbox. The sandbox test is useless. If the platform fights your existing guardrails, it'll fail when you try to scale it.

You're spot on about the "babysitting" aspect. I'd add one more angle: watch out for the hidden control plane.

The worst offenders give you a SaaS UI but then make you host and manage their "gateway" or "coordinator" on a Kubernetes cluster you provision. So you're still on the hook for its uptime, scaling, and security patches. It's not offloading infrastructure, it's just repackaging it with their branding.

>The sandbox test is useless.
So true. The real test is how it behaves when your network team's default-deny security groups are applied. Does the platform gracefully use a proxy or break and demand you open a CIDR block to the entire internet? That's the moment you know.