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
CloudBees Continuous Integration
Score 7.8 out of 10
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CloudBees Continuous Integration (formerly the CloudBees Jenkins Platform) is a continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD) solution that extends Jenkins. Developed for on-premise installations, CloudBees CI offers stable releases with monthly updates, as well as additional proprietary tools and enterprise features to enhance the manageability and security of Jenkins. CloudBees CI helps administrators manage growing installations due to ever-increasing teams, projects and jobs…
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Docker
Score 8.7 out of 10
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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…
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.
For all continuous integration features like multi branch pipeline, continuous build, and deployment execution, highly customizable groovy scripting, well integration with most of repositories like SVN, GIT, etc. are some of the exceptional features which helps devOps related tasks a treat to work everyday. With some minor changes in agent configuration and handling of their configuration on master instances would reduce a lot of issues. Also, cache of maven handling on agents needs to be improved (though not related to tool but the CI pipelines). But, since this is a very mature and performant tool, we expect some out of the box functionalities to handle all such scenarios. Overall, the tool works wonders because of its highly customizable features.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Support seems very unreachable from my experience. They handle cases if developers are facing issues, support seems to be very limited. It's not like other tools in a market where every mail is being taken priority and responses are sent. We see a lack in this particular aspect when it comes to CloudBees Jenkins Platform.
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.
CloudBees Jenkins Support is on par with the other enterprise tools we're currently using. It has performed well enough that we've adopted the product and placed it in the critical path of our software delivery pipelines.
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.
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.
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.
