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
Google Cloud Virtual Private Cloud (VPC)
Score 9.3 out of 10
N/A
Google Cloud Virtual Private Cloud has a network of 27 regions and 200+ countries and territories, boasting little to no downtime for its users. It is automatically configured or can be done by the user and allows you to bring your own IP addresses to reduce downtime caused by migration.
$0
per ingress traffic
Pricing
CircleCI
Google Cloud Virtual Private Cloud (VPC)
Editions & Modules
Server
Contact Sales
Performance
starting at $15
per month
Scale
starting at $2000
per month
egress traffic
$0 - 0.15
per GB
ingress traffic
$0
based on services that process ingress traffic: Load Balancers, Cloud NAT, Protocol forwarding.
Premium Tier (egress rates)
$0- $0.23
per month per GB of data delivered
Standard Tier (egress rates)
$0.045, $0.065, $0.085
per month per GB of data delivered: 150-500TB, 10-150TB, 0-10TB
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.
An effective pricing strategy is in place. Google Cloud VPC is the most secure since it runs on a private network and never contacts the public network. Google is well-known for its AI/ML and Kubernetes engines, both of which have a leg up on the competition. Google Cloud VPC's database services are yet to be improved.
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.
VPC is a difficult concept to grasp and recommendations for configuring it would be helpful in educating the users to make the right choice while using the product in configuring networking for their cloud deployments. Also, the user interface can be intuitively designed so as to suggest templates to perform common configurations with regard to VPC.
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.
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.
Google VPC and networking infrastructure is very matured and is built later after Amazon VPC. It made sure to address all the limitations faced by amazon VPC. Google Virtual private cloud is across regions while amazon VPC covers only one region but multiple zones. Google VPC is a global resource while AWS is a regional resource.
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.
