Ambassador offers a suite of products designed to deliver API developer experiences that fuel innovation. Blackbird API Development Platform enables developers to spec, mock, write boilerplate code, and debug APIs faster.
$10
per month (for a single user and 5 concurrent instances)
Docker
Score 8.7 out of 10
N/A
Docker Enterprise was sold to Mirantis in 2019; that product is now sold as Mirantis Kubernetes Engine. But Docker now offers a 2-product suite that includes Docker Desktop, which they present as a fast way to containerize applications on a desktop; and, Docker Hub, a service for finding and sharing container images with a team and the Docker community, a repository of container images with an array of…
$5
per month
Jenkins
Score 8.4 out of 10
N/A
Jenkins is an open source automation server. Jenkins provides hundreds of plugins to support building, deploying and automating any project. As an extensible automation server, Jenkins can be used as a simple CI server or turned into a continuous delivery hub for any project.
Ambassador is really well suited for scenarios were you need to give power and freedom to your developers so they can take advantage of the self-service approach. One of the few scenarios I can not recommend using Ambassador is in the case you are planning to not using Kubernetes as it is a solution designed to work specifically on that platform
You are going to be able to find the most resources and examples using Docker whenever you are working with a container orchestration software like Kubernetes. There will always some entropy when you run in a container, a containerized application will never be as purely performant as an app running directly on the OS. However, in most scenarios this loss will be negligible to the time saved in deployment, monitoring, etc.
Jenkins is a highly customizable CI/CD tool with excellent community support. One can use Jenkins to build and deploy monolith services to microservices with ease. It can handle multiple "builds" per agent simultaneously, but the process can be resource hungry, and you need some impressive specs server for that. With Jenkins, you can automate almost any task. Also, as it is an open source, we can save a load of money by not spending on enterprise CI/CD tools.
Automated Builds: Jenkins is configured to monitor the version control system for new pull requests. Once a pull request is created, Jenkins automatically triggers a build process. It checks out the code, compiles it, and performs any necessary build steps specified in the configuration.
Unit Testing: Jenkins runs the suite of unit tests defined for the project. These tests verify the functionality of individual components and catch any regressions or errors. If any unit tests fail, Jenkins marks the build as unsuccessful, and the developer is notified to fix the issues.
Code Analysis: Jenkins integrates with code analysis tools like SonarQube or Checkstyle. It analyzes the code for quality, adherence to coding standards, and potential bugs or vulnerabilities. The results are reported back to the developer and the product review team for further inspection.
We have a certain buy-in as we have made a lot of integrations and useful tools around jenkins, so it would cost us quite some time to change to another tool. Besides that, it is very versatile, and once you have things set up, it feels unnecessary to change tool. It is also a plus that it is open source.
It's great! it's amazingly simple to use and the best part is the self-service approach. I also like how easy it is to add a new route to a endpoint with the mappings definition.
I have been using Docker for more than 3 years and it really simplifies the modern application development and deployment. I like the ability of Docker to improve efficiency, portability and scalability for developers and operations teams. Another reason for giving this rating is because Docker integrates CI/CD pipelines very well
Jenkins streamlines development and provides end to end automated integration and deployment. It even supports Docker and Kubernetes using which container instances can be managed effectively. It is easy to add documentation and apply role based access to files and services using Jenkins giving full control to the users. Any deviation can be easily tracked using the audit logs.
No, when we integrated this with GitHub, it becomes more easy and smart to manage and control our workforce. Our distributed workforce is now streamlined to a single bucket. All of our codes and production outputs are now automatically synced with all the workers. There are many cases when our in-house team makes changes in the release, our remote workers make another release with other environment variables. So it is better to get all of the work in control.
Overall the support has been great and quick to answer the requests I've submitted in the past. I was originally using the community/open source version and I can't say it was the best experience I had, it wasn't terrible but it wasn't great. I believe the biggest issue was that they refer to the documentation a lot but the documentation isn't updated regularly so I feel it's lagging behind the most recent versions.
As with all open source solutions, the support can be minimal and the information that you can find online can at times be misleading. Support may be one of the only real downsides to the overall software package. The user community can be helpful and is needed as the product is not the most user-friendly thing we have used.
It is worth well the time to setup Jenkins in a docker container. It is also well worth to take the time to move any "Jenkins configuration" into Jenkinsfiles and not take shortcuts.
They both offer about the same in terms of end goal and purpose of use and scenarios. However, Ambassador does way better in terms of simplifying the syntax and makes offer a little bit more of control by adding the concepts of hosts, mappings while staying away from a hard to read single file configuration.
The reason why we are still using Docker right now is due to that is the best among its peers and suits our needs the best. However, the trend we foresee for the future might indicate Amazon lambda could potentially fit our needs to code enviornmentless in the near future.
Overall, Jenkins is the easiest platform for someone who has no experience to come in and use effectively. We can get a junior engineer into Jenkins, give them access, and point them in the right direction with minimal hand-holding. The competing products I have used (TravisCI/GitLab/Azure) provide other options but can obfuscate the process due to the lack of straightforward simplicity. In other areas (capability, power, customization), Jenkins keeps up with the competition and, in some areas, like customization, exceeds others.
It is the only tool in our toolset that has not [had] any issues so far. That is really a mark of reliability, and it's a testimony to how well the product is made, and a tool that does its job well is a tool well worth having. It is the base tool that I would say any organisation must have if they do scalable deployment.
