AWS CodePipeline vs. CircleCI

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

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

• 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

• 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

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

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

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

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

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.

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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.

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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

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

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

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

• 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

• 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