AWS CodePipeline vs. Azure Pipelines vs. IBM DevOps Deploy

I think AWS CodePipeline is a great tool for anyone wanted automated deployments in a multi-server/container AWS environment. AWS also offers services like Elastic Beanstalk that provide a more managed hosting & deployment experience. CodePipeline is a good middle ground with solid, built-in automation with enough customizability to not lock people into one deployment or architecture philosophy.

Incentivized

It is good tool if you are doing continuous improvements in your code and you wish it goes live whenever you push code to GitHub. So integrating Azure Pipeline, it automatically does CI/CD in the background once you push code/merge code and it is live in few minutes. It also does some automated tests if you have wrote scripts

Incentivized

IBM UrbanCode Deploy is excellent for code deployments such as Java, .Net, C++, etc. It can also deploy and run SQLs reasonably well. Where it lacks is the ability for executables, Jars, WARs, EARs, etc.

Incentivized

• It is reliable and works without errors
• It integrates well with our repository and all other AWS functions as well as our end database

Incentivized

• Integration with SonarQube
• Integration with Azure DevOps
• Integration with GitHub

Incentivized

• Visual deployment instructions.
• Inventory management of environments.
• Component configuration at a granular level with customization.

Incentivized

• Ease of use - things like CircleCI or other tools are a bit easier to learn.
• Ability to build from more sources.

Incentivized

• The errors which we got sometimes are not clearly enough.
• There are some let's say hidden options, they could be more visible
• When the process is running we have to remember about manually refreshing to see the current status because it doesn't work automatically

Incentivized

• IBM UrbanCode Deploy does code deployments easy enough, but configurations or ex deployments are a little more complicated. I work on packaged systems, so most of the code I get is form a vendor that I have to deploy.
• IBM UebanCode Deploy integration into the mainframe world would be ideal. My company uses Mainframe and OpenSystems technologies, and many times there are dependencies between the deployments.

Incentivized

Overall, I give AWS Codepipeline a 9 because it gets the job done and I can't complain much about the web interface as much of the action is taking place behind the scenes on the terminal locally or via Amazon's infrastructure anyway. It would be nicer to have a better flowing and visualizable web interface, however.

Incentivized

It's challenging to get a working knowledge of the product without having someone show you the ropes. Linking components with applications and applications with resource trees and resource trees with application deploys is not intuitive. However, once past that learning curve, the possibilities open up, and things become easier to understand and allow for further granularity.

Incentivized

Our pipeline takes about 30 minutes to run through. Although this time depends on the applications you are using on either end, I feel that it is a reasonable time to make upgrades and updates to our system as it is not an every day push.

Incentivized

We didn't need a lot of support with AWS CodePipeline as it was pretty straightforward to configure and use, but where we ran into problems, the AWS community was able to help. AWS support agents were also helpful in resolving some of the minor issues we encountered, which we could not find a solution elsewhere.

Incentivized

I've not worked directly with IBM UrbanCode Deploy support. My DevOps team administers the environment and deals with that.

Incentivized

CodeCommit and CodeDeploy can be used with CodePipeline so it’s not really fair to stack them against each other as they can be quite the compliment. The same goes for Beanstalk, which is often used as a deployment target in relation to CodePipeline.

CodePipeline fulfills the CI/CD duty, where the other services do not focus on that specific function. They are supplements, not replacements. CodePipeline will detect the updated code and handle deploying it to the actual instance via Beanstalk.

Jenkins is open source and not a native AWS service, that is its primary differentiator. Jenkins can also be used as a supplement to CodePipeline.

Incentivized

We have used the GitHub CI/CD. Earlier we were using the Azure Pipelines but after GitHub had their actions, we integrated that for CI/CD. It runs the tests and makes a production build which can be live. GitHub CI/CD is more useful because we have to make script only once then just by few changes we can deploy it onto Azure, AWS, Google anywhere so we found it more convenient

Incentivized

• CodePipeline has reduced ongoing devops costs for my clients, especially around deployment & testing.
• CodePipeline has sped up development workflow by making the deployment process automated off git pushes. Deployment takes very little coordination as the system will just trigger based on what is the latest commit in a branch.
• CodePipeline offered a lot of out-of-the-box functionality that was much simpler to setup than a dedicated CI server. It allowed the deployment process to built and put into production with much less and effort and cost compared to rolling the functionality manually.

Incentivized

• we have had outages from Azure in the past

Incentivized

• Push button deployments.
• Consistency and ability to focus on other tasks.
• Required quite a bit of upfront customization with certain web deployments (WebSphere, etc.)
• Opened the door to other types of deployments and other automation.

Incentivized