Throughout the years I have seen many companies using different tools to achieve same/similar things in CI/CD area. There's no denying that Jenkins is probably the most widely used solution due to the huge amount of available integrations and plugins. There are, however, some downsides such as resource consumption that can become very expensive at scale. I always remember this great article from Monzo Building a Modern Bank Backend that was mostly about migrating from Mesos to Kubernetes, but it does have some important points such as:
Previously, we ran several very beefy Jenkins hosts dedicated to the task, which were inefficient and expensive. Now, build jobs run under Kubernetes, using spare capacity in our existing infrastructure, which is basically free. - Oliver Beattie
Similar issues I have noticed in other companies, such as disks getting full due to growing workspaces or just agents getting quite slow due to insufficient host resources. Most of these issues could be labelled as user configuration problem, but then it seems that they don't exist in other systems.
My favourite tools to automate tasks:
- Google Cloud Build - powerful and cheap alternative to CircleCI/Travis. If you are running on GCP, I would definitely recommend looking into it as for most users it will be running for free :0
- Gitlab CI/CD + runners. A great model, probably designed based on drone.io server/agent model. Nevertheless, works great most of the time :)
- Drone - very lightweight solution that you can run even on your desktop or on any server. Pipelines are defined in the same repo as your code and all builds happen in containers, so no issues with dirty workspaces or tying them to individual hosts.
It would be interesting to know what tools other people are using and why, please write your answer in the comments! :)
Oldest comments (28)
Concourse CI is pretty neat. I used only once in my previous company so I cannot share much experience with it.
If you want to see it in action, their pipeline is public.
My company uses Gitlab CI/CD + runners model as we self-host gitlab on our servers. So I really like how it comes with it which I didn't know that it's possible when I was using GitHub beside the use of Travis CI
Gitlab, like the all in-one but we aren't doing anything too advanced.
I don't have much outside Jenkins and gitlab, toughed some of Travis.
I prefer gitlab, but it is much more opinionated than Jenkins. My experience so far is nah environment management sucks and Kerbernetes is a big lift especially exists code bases.
I've been using Azure Pipelines at work and liked it so much that I've started testing Orchid with it as well, with the hope of eventually replacing Travis CI with it.
I develop on a Mac locally and am having trouble with the Windows builds (which I'm not seeing on AppVeyor, BTW), which is a blocker for me using is exclusively right now. But other than that, it's really easy to set up and very powerful.
has anyone a good strategy to build/test ARM images together with x86?
I'm still putting the finishing touches on a dev.to post about this very thing, but here's the gist:
And my post: dev.to/jeikabu/migrating-to-docker...
We have Gitlab, Jenkins, VSTS(Azure DevOps) and TeamCity. I personally like TC because of its ease to configure, out of the box plug-ins and great documentation.
During one project I also had a chance to use TC, really liked it, however due to budget constraints we had to go with Jenkins :) How does it currently work with containers?
That's understandable and the reason we have three environments. One for Unit tests, one for automation and one for CI. There's advantages and disadvantages to having one large environment compared to multiple, but it's worked for us so far and TC adding 100 build configurations has helped.
It works great with containers, but we don't do anything advanced with Docker. A lot more time was spent spinning up 2016 agent servers, enabling and configuring Docker on Windows and all the dev work for it to work with swarm.
We're using enterprise git and travisCI at my work and it's been great to use. I prefer build configs in the project, travis does that very well and the flexibility it offers us in how we approach our pipelines has been awesome.
edit: props to TravisCI support, we've had a few late nights do to different issues and they are responsive and very much engaged with their customers.
sometimes...
Hopefully I can free up some time this year to explore some other ones; gitlab is awesome but until they fix their performance issues (idk, maybe they did it's been a few years) it's a huge no go for me.
My team is on Azure Devops and love it. This article is interesting to me because my company is wanting to use Jenkins and I think it's a mistake. There seem to be better options.
CA Release Automation, I get why people use Jenkins as a deployment tool as well as a build tool but it's not designed for deployment.. No built-in structure for it, it has to be tweaked to work unlike Bamboo which builds and deploys and can maintain branch separation