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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IBM Terraform
Score 8.8 out of 10
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IBM Terraform (formerly Hashicorp Terraform) is a cloud infrastructure automation tool used to create, change, and improve production infrastructure, and it allows infrastructure to be expressed as code. It is available Open Source, and via Cloud and Self-Hosted editions.
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.
Anything that needs to be repeated en masse. Terraform is great at taking a template and have it be repeated across your estate. You can dynamically change the assets they're generating depending on certain variables. Which means though templated assets will all be similar, they're allowed to have unique properties about them. For example flattening JSON into tabular data and ensuring the flattening code is unique to the file's schema.
The language itself is a bit unusual and this makes it hard for new users to get onboarded into the codebase. While it's improving with later releases, basic concepts like "map an array of options into a set of configurations" or "apply this logic if a variable is specified" are possible but unnecessarily cumbersome.
The 'Terraform Plan' operation could be substantially more sophisticated. There are many situations where a Terraform file could never work but successfully passes the 'plan' phase only to fail during the 'apply' phase.
Environment migrations could be smoother. Renaming/refactoring files is a challenge because of the need to use 'Terraform mv' commands, etc.
I love Terraform and I think it has done some great things for people that are working to automate their provisioning processes and also for those that are in the process of moving to the cloud or managing cloud resources. There are some quirks to HCL that take a little bit of getting used to and give picking up Terraform a little bit of a learning curve, thus the rating
Terraform's performance is quite amazing when it comes to deployment of resources in AWS. Of course, the deployment times depend on various parameters like the number of resources to deploy and different regions to deploy. Terraform cannot control that. The only minor drawback probably shows up when a terraform job is terminated mid way. Then in many cases, time-consuming manual cleanup is required.
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.
I have yet to have an opportunity to reach out directly to HashiCorp for support on Terraform. However, I have spent a great deal of time considering their documentation as I use the tool. This opinion is based solely on that. I find the Terraform documentation to have great breadth but lacking in depth in many areas. I appreciate that all of the tool's resources have an entry in the docs but often the examples are lacking. Often, the examples provided are very basic and prompt additional exploration. Also, the links in the documentation often link back to the same page where one might expect to be linked to a different source with additional information.
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.
Terraform is the solid leader in the space. It allows you to do more then just provisioning within a pre-existing servers. It is more extensible and has more providers available than it competitors. It is also open source and more adopted by the community then some of the other solutions that are available in the market place.
we are able to deploy our infrastructure in a couple of ours in an automated and repeatable way, before this could take weeks if the work was done manually and was a lot of error prone.
having the state file, you can see a diff of what things have changed manually out side of Terraform which is a huge plus
if state file gets corrupted, it is very hard to debug or restore it without an impact or spending hours ..
writing big scale code can be very challenging and hard to be efficient so it's usable by the whole team
