AWS CodeArtifact is a fully managed artifact repository service that aims to make it easy for organizations of any size to securely store, publish, and share software packages used in their software development process. CodeArtifact can be configured to automatically fetch software packages and dependencies from public artifact repositories so developers have access to the latest versions.
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CircleCI
Score 9.5 out of 10
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CircleCI is a software delivery engine from the company of the same name in San Francisco, that helps teams ship software faster, offering their platform for Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD). Ultimately, the solution helps to map every source of change for software teams, so they can accelerate innovation and growth.
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for up to 6,000 build minutes and up to 5 active users per month
We have a small team with limited resources and it worked well for us. Hence I can conclude that AWS Code Artifact are well suited for organizations which have limited resources in terms of hardware and access to administrators for setting up artifact repository in-house. AWS Code Artifact is also suited particularly well for organization(s) which are already using AWS Services/Infrastructure (eg. EC2) . It works quite well with existing AWS services and completes the gap which existed in AWS offering for quite some time. Organizations can move their entire DevOps toolchain and infrastructure to Amazon. It is less appropriate for organization(s) which rely on artifacts like Debian, C/C++, Go etc as AWS does not support those fully.
Based on our experience, CircleCI is well-suited for automating mobile app release cycles. For example, to release an iOS app, you would need to build, sign, and upload it to TestFlight, which requires a dedicated Mac in the office. But with CircleCI, you can have macOS executors, so you don't have to manage a physical build machine. Another benefit is that CircleCI's certified AWS Orbs abstract away complex authentication and deployment logic, allowing us to build, push, and deploy Docker containers to Amazon ECS with minimal configuration and high reliability. CircleCI is less suited for smaller projects where the development and deployment are not that extensive, for example, a static site. Once you have built a static site, you probably won't make any further changes, so there's no point in paying for it.
Automated builds! This is really why you get CircleCI, to automate the build process. This makes building your application far more reliable and repeatable. It can also run tests and verify your application is working as expected.
Simple. Unlike Jenkins, Teamcity, or other platforms, CircleCI doesn't need a lot of setup. It's completely hosted, so there's no infrastructure to set up. The config file does take a bit to understand, but if you follow their example and start with something small and add to it, you can get it up and going quicker than it first looks.
Scales easily. Again, since it's all cloud-based, you don't have to manage or scale infrastructure. Simply subscribe to the number of containers you want, and scaling up just means buying more containers.
The reliability & speed, it just works. The ability to spin up macOS runners and Docker containers on demand without managing hardware is a huge win. The Orbs system makes integrating with AWS and Slack incredibly easy, saving us weeks of custom scripting and providing real-time updates in our Slack channel. This makes it easy for us to track and ensures that everyone involved knows the status. Of course, it has drawbacks related to configuration complexity and, in some cases, cost transparency, but overall, it is an industry-standard, robust tool that solves our core infrastructure problems well.
It's pretty snappy, even with using workflows with multiple steps and different docker images. I've seen builds take a long time if it's really involved, but from what I can tell, it's still at least on par if not faster than other build tools.
Unless you have a reasonably large account, you're going to be mainly stuck reading their documentation. Which has improved somewhat over the years but is still extremely limited compared to a platform like Digital Ocean who invested in the documentation and a community to ensure it's kept up to date. If you can't find your answer there, you can be stuck.
AWS CodeArtifact is an excellent choice for organization(s) which are looking to move their infrastructure and devops toolchain to Amazon. It is very useful for teams/organizations on limited budget or do not want to take on infrastructure and maintenance costs associated with the artifact repository. Other software solutions require resources for setting up and need ongoing maintenance.
Jenkins is usually self-hosted, Travis CI's infrastructure is largely unreliable (lots of tests time out for no discernable reason), and Semaphore encourages you to configure your CI/CD from a web UI. We like CircleCI because its hosted, our tests run largely as expected on their infrastructure, and we can configure it from a config file that we track in GitHub.
Overall CodeArtifact has positive ROI on the our team. We had limited budget for procurement of server/administrators. With CodeArtifact we were able to get some savings.
We were able to deliver faster hence customers were quite happy. That led to customer satisfaction
We didnt have to invest on maintaining network infrastructure/uptime and security. That saved us quite a bit of hassle and funds.
We pay over $5K/ month and we have high expectations for service. Sometimes I feel that we don't get the value, but only sometimes.
We have had to build our own application to keep state and broker releases and deployments. We call our app deployer. I feel that CircleCI could do more to understand our needs and possibly build additional features that would enable us to invest less in build and deployment infrastructure and justify paying more for Circle.
