Codeship from CloudBees is a build automation platform from the Austrian company of the same name.
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Salt
Score 7.8 out of 10
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Built on Python, Salt is an event-driven automation tool and framework to deploy, configure, and manage complex IT systems. Salt is used to automate common infrastructure administration tasks and ensure that all the components of infrastructure are operating in a consistent desired state.
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.
SaltStack is a very well architected toolset and framework for reliably managing distributed systems' complexity at varied scale. If the diversity of kind or number of assets is low, or the dependencies are bounded and simple, it might be overkill. Realization that you need SaltStack might come in the form of other tools, scripts, or jobs whose code has become difficult, unreliable, or unmaintainable. Rather than a native from-scratch SaltStack design, be aware that SaltStack can be added on to tools like Docker or Chef and optionally factor those tools out or other tools into the mix.
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.
Targeting is easy and yet extremely granular - I can target machines by name, role, operating system, init system, distro, regex, or any combination of the above.
Abstraction of OS, package manager and package details is far advanced beyond any other CRM I have seen. The ability to set one configuration for a package across multiple distros, and have it apply correctly no matter the distrospecific naming convention or package installation procedure, is amazing.
Abstraction of environments is similarly valuable - I can set a firewall rule to allow ssh from "management", and have that be defined as a specific IP range per dev, test, and prod.
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.
We haven't had to spend a lot of time talking to support, and we've only had one issue, which, when dealing with other vendors is actually not that bad of an experience.
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 moved to SaltStack from Puppet about 3 years ago. Puppet just has too much of a learning curve and we inherited it from an old IT regime. We wanted something we could start fresh with. Our team has never looked back. SaltStack is so much easier for us to use and maintain.
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.
We manage two complex highly available self-healing (all infrastructure and systems) environments using SaltStack. Only one person is needed to run SaltStack. That is a HUGE return on investment.
Building tooling on top of SaltStack has allowed us to share administrative abilities by role - e.g. employee X can deploy software Y. No need to call a sysadmin and etc.
Recovery from problems, or time to stand-up new systems is now counted in minutes (usually under eight) rather than hours. This is a strategic advantage for rolling out new services.
