AWS CodeDeploy vs. CircleCI

For greenfield projects built on AWS there are very few reasons why not to choose AWS CodeDeploy. It works out of the box and integrates seamlessly into your cloud environment. If you plan to migrate your existing legacy builds away e.g. from Jenkins, you may need to reserve a substantial amount of time for that and the benefits gained may not be worth the effort.

Incentivized

CircleCI is perfect for a CI/CD pipeline for an app using a standard build process. It'll take more work for a complex build process, but should still be up to the task unless you need a lot of integrations with other tools. If you have a big team and can spare someone to focus full time on just the CI/CD tools, maybe something like Jenkins is better, but if you're just looking to get your app built, tested, and delivered without a huge amount of effort, CircleCI is probably your preferred tool.

Incentivized

• Automate to deploy to AWS cloud environments
• Maximize application availability during product deployment
• AWS CodeDeploy provides CLI or web management console which can be viewed or edited at any environment

Incentivized

• Multiple builds can be run at the same time in parallel.
• The CircleCI web interface (UI/UX) is very easy to understand and use.
• Easy Configuration to learn and use. Just a single configuration YAML file.
• Many integrations. We use the GItHub, Slack, and DataDog integrations.

Incentivized

• When deploying a branch, sometimes the repository won't auto-populate, and you have to add the source manually

Incentivized

• The "phases" their config file uses to separate out options seem very arbitrary and are not very helpful for organizing your config file
• No way that I know of to configure which version of MongoDB you use. You have to write your own shell script to download and start MongoDB if you want a specific version.
• Hard to access build artifacts in the UI

Incentivized

CircleCI interface is awesome in that it is relatively modern and makes it clear exactly which parts of the engineering lifecycle you are in

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Jenkins supports a lot of plugings. Also with Jenkins, it is possible to manage everything through our own server. Those are 2 points where I rate Jenkins as one of the best DevOps Tool

Incentivized

Circle was the first CI with simple setup, great documentation, and tight integration with GitHub. Using Jenkins was too much maintenance and overhead, TeamCity was limited in how we could customize it and run concurrent builds, TravisCI was not available for private repos when we switched.

Incentivized

• 1-2 months per year of working time was saved from administration compared to on-prem legacy solution.
• Teams can trust more on the CI/CD pipeline and the deployments are faster, so the teams can deploy 10-15% more often compared to on-prem legacy solutions.
• Developers tend to desire more bells and whistles than CodeDeploy can offer, there has been some critique but this can be seen also as "editor war" (everyone has their opinion).

Incentivized

• It has eased the burden of standardizing our testing and deployment, making onboarding new developers much faster, and having to fix deployment mistakes much less often.
• It allows us to focus our process around the GitHub workflow, ignoring the details of whatever environment the thing we're working on is actually hosted in. This saves us time.

Incentivized