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
IBM DevOps Deploy
Score 9.0 out of 10
N/A
A solution for continuous delivery of any application to any environment, and an application-release solution that infuses automation into the continuous delivery and continuous deployment (CI/CD) process and provides robust visibility, traceability and auditing capabilities.
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.
IBM UrbanCode Deploy is excellent for code deployments such as Java, .Net, C++, etc. It can also deploy and run SQLs reasonably well. Where it lacks is the ability for executables, Jars, WARs, EARs, etc.
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.
IBM UrbanCode Deploy does code deployments easy enough, but configurations or ex deployments are a little more complicated. I work on packaged systems, so most of the code I get is form a vendor that I have to deploy.
IBM UebanCode Deploy integration into the mainframe world would be ideal. My company uses Mainframe and OpenSystems technologies, and many times there are dependencies between the deployments.
It's challenging to get a working knowledge of the product without having someone show you the ropes. Linking components with applications and applications with resource trees and resource trees with application deploys is not intuitive. However, once past that learning curve, the possibilities open up, and things become easier to understand and allow for further granularity.
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.
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.
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.
