Codeship from CloudBees is a build automation platform from the Austrian company of the same name.
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HAProxy Community Edition
Score 9.3 out of 10
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HAProxy Community Edition is a free, open source reverse-proxy offering high availability, load balancing, and proxying for TCP and HTTP-based applications. It is presented as suited for very high traffic web sites.
Codeship is extremely well suited for projects that are version controlled on public hosting such as Github or Bitbucket, and for situations where you need to pick up code from these systems and deploy it to different cloud environments. For example, we had two projects for the same client that were hosted on Github and needed to be deployed to AWS and Heroku. The native CI/CD tools of these cloud environments could not provide a holistic solution to deploy to both environments the way Codeship did.
It prevents a single server failure from being a downtime event by adding redundancy to every layer of your architecture. A load balancer facilitates redundancy for the backend layer (web/app servers), but for a true high availability setup, you need to have redundant load balancers as well. So it is well suited for all production related servers and less suited for individual servers that do not require redundancy.
Codeship provides a set of tools for quickly creating and building our deployment artifacts and push them to the designated servers.
Codeship's hooks allows our developers to simply push tags from our git repositories to initiate a deployment of code to a server. No one outside of the devops team needs any expertise to get our code packages delivered.
Codeship allows us to tie in behat and unit tests easily to prevent delivery of buggy code.
I would like to see a little bit more than the green/red status. If there are tests, it would be good to see how many have failed on a red build.
To improve build times (and reduce feedback times), it would be good to see how long build, tests, and deployment take over time. An overview like that could very easily point to potential areas of improvement. I think Codeship users do not want to bother with the build process, but, if there is anything to improve and increase productivity it's very unlikely that users wouldn't want to do this.
A few, rare times each year, HAProxy CPU utilization spikes to 100% and server has to be rebooted - this may be related to HAProxy OR it could be an external factor causing this.
It is very easy to use. I was able to find a lot of documents for it on the internet. Very good community support. There are lots of examples available to try. We mostly use a command-line user interface to interact with it. The CLI is also super easy to use and very easy to interact with
We haven't used customer support. We mostly used the community version. We build a multi-node HAProxy cluster with HA to the proxy itself using opensource plugins available. With the support available on the internet and the documents available we don't need to use much customer support.
Our company uses Jenkins for all internal deployment processes for one very important reason - it's hosted internally. But Codeship is great for personal use - it has intuitive UI, easy setup and tons of integrations.
We chose HA Proxy because it is cheaper than a hardware balancer, it is an open-source solution with a large community behind it and with constant updates. It also allows custom scripts according to needs.HA Proxy is a solution used in many internet sites like GitHub, Reddit, Twitter, and Tuenti.
Having the code tested thoroughly. While it's obviously a part of the job that still requires the developer to sit down and to actually have some decent and thorough tests implemented, by using codeship we were able to guarantee 100% that our code was being tested each and every time it got commited and pushed onto our repositories. Leading to a faster, shorter and sure implementation iterative cycle.
Fewer 'man in the middle' processes which required more steps and people involved just to get the code shipped onto our deployment servers.
Almost inexistent learning curve. Codeship is simple to use and very intuitive. Nobody in our development department had a hard time figuring out how to have it properly configured for each new project created there.
Significantly lower investment vs competitors. In the case of F5s we have Virtual Editions so we're paying for the hardware to run it on top of the several thousand dollar licenses that are required for each pair and we currently have a pair of F5s per client so there's a huge potential for cost savings there.
Requires our network engineers to learn a new skill or our Systems engineers to take on the responsibility of managing the load balancers. It's not a huge difference either way, but it does impact the way we have done business in the past.
