AWS CodePipeline is a fully managed continuous delivery service that helps users automate release pipelines. CodePipeline automates the build, test, and deploy phases of the release process every time there is a code change, based on the release model a user defines.
$1
per active pipeline/per month
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
Daylite
Score 7.0 out of 10
Small Businesses (1-50 employees)
Daylite is a project management solution built around features such as contact management, scheduling, and sales pipeline tracking.
I felt that, out of the alternatives, AWS CodePipeline was the simplest to setup and most reliable. Since my client's infrastructure was already hosted in AWS, I felt it was a no-brainer. If a client needed a similar solution with on-prem or non-AWS infrastructure, I would …
AWS Codepipeline is proprietary to Amazon Web Services and works well when you're working with other AWS products. If you're using a different technology stack, then Codepipeline may not be the best tool and some open source/closed source tools available on the web may suffice.
They all pretty much have the same feature set. AWS CodePipeline has been improving in recent years, and it just makes sense to keep everything within Amazon's ecosystem.
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.
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.
Well suited for any size company which needs CRM management. Easy to use. Great for individuals or teams that use Apple products. Daylite and ios expert integration has been key in capturing leads from our website into the Daylite database, plus then if they opt into email marketing, they are entered into the MailChimp database. The web forms also automate the creation of opportunities and are linked with the contacts/companies. Sales Managers with geographical responsibilities can easily filter contacts or projects based on these regions so they only see what they need. Daylite is not appropriate for Windows users.
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.
Daylite allows you to link your email so when you email a client it will link to their contact in Daylite and save the communication so anyone on the team can see all the emails that have been sent between the client and our company.
Daylite allows you to create "opportunities" for the different packages and services we offer. This lets us track where someone is in the process, if they are still thinking about a service, have been sold on it, or are not interested.
Daylite lets you leave notes on the account that everyone on the team can see. This has been so helpful for our company because it lets us drop helpful notes on personal things about the client that would be good for everyone to know.
The main drawback of Daylite is that it becomes slow on its iOS mobile devices.
Sometimes I face a lot of retries to log into the account. The mobile app needs a change and needs an upgrade. Apps are lacking in giving appointment reminders on time. Sometimes it does not notify on the right time about the appointment with the client.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Daylite provides authentic services and features with excellent programming. I have also collaborated on the Daylite calendar with Apple Calendar so that I can never leave behind any updates of the future. Moreover, it keeps on updating its feature for giving better services.
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.
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.
Daylite has been very helpful for new employees to answer their own questions about contacts/passwords, etc.
We found the tiny notification bell to be weak, sometimes a project comes in with a tight deadline and we have to double-check and ask an employee if they saw the notification. More time would be saved by just chatting about the project and its expectations.
A huge benefit is the institutional knowledge that can be had by reading past projects. We've tracked everything, so the history is there.
