AWS CodeBuild is a fully managed continuous integration service that compiles source code, runs tests, and produces software packages that are ready to deploy.
$0.01
Per Minute
CircleCI
Score 9.5 out of 10
N/A
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.
$0
for up to 6,000 build minutes and up to 5 active users per month
CloudBees Continuous Integration
Score 7.8 out of 10
N/A
CloudBees Continuous Integration (formerly the CloudBees Jenkins Platform) is a continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD) solution that extends Jenkins. Developed for on-premise installations, CloudBees CI offers stable releases with monthly updates, as well as additional proprietary tools and enterprise features to enhance the manageability and security of Jenkins. CloudBees CI helps administrators manage growing installations due to ever-increasing teams, projects and jobs…
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.
For all continuous integration features like multi branch pipeline, continuous build, and deployment execution, highly customizable groovy scripting, well integration with most of repositories like SVN, GIT, etc. are some of the exceptional features which helps devOps related tasks a treat to work everyday. With some minor changes in agent configuration and handling of their configuration on master instances would reduce a lot of issues. Also, cache of maven handling on agents needs to be improved (though not related to tool but the CI pipelines). But, since this is a very mature and performant tool, we expect some out of the box functionalities to handle all such scenarios. Overall, the tool works wonders because of its highly customizable features.
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.
It was difficult to create a branching strategy with GitHub. We had everything running from main, but in a true devops environment, we would like to incorporate a true branching strategy.
I would like to share build projects with each AWS account we utilize versus creating a build project in each account. It will allow us consistent deployments across the board.
The error logs are natively in AWS, but when developers do not have access, there is no way for them to view error logs for maintenance other than an admin who has access to share the error logs.
It is a highly usable, well integrated CI/CD service, patricularly for AWS-centric organizations. It is a strong balance between simplicity and flexibility. Security was integrated with AWS Secrets Manager allowing secrets to be retrieved dynamically - a huge usability win for us. I did not enjoy the manual build for each environment
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.
Support seems very unreachable from my experience. They handle cases if developers are facing issues, support seems to be very limited. It's not like other tools in a market where every mail is being taken priority and responses are sent. We see a lack in this particular aspect when it comes to CloudBees Jenkins Platform.
AWS CodeBuild provides the option to fully implement the build in the cloud without wasting your local resources (computer and network) providing independence to developers to invest those resources in other processes. It also provides a robust platform with a lot of customizations or just a script for each language.
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.
CloudBees Jenkins Support is on par with the other enterprise tools we're currently using. It has performed well enough that we've adopted the product and placed it in the critical path of our software delivery pipelines.
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.
