GoCD, from ThoughtWorks in Chicago, is an application lifecycle management and development tool.
N/A
IBM DevOps Deploy
Score 8.8 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.
Previously, our team used Jenkins. However, since it's a shared deployment resource we don't have admin access. We tried GoCD as it's open source and we really like. We set up our deployment pipeline to run whenever codes are merged to master, run the unit test and revert back if it doesn't pass. Once it's deployed to the staging environment, we can simply do 1-click to deploy the appropriate version to production. We use this to deploy to an on-prem server and also AWS. Some deployment pipelines use custom Powershell script for.Net application, some others use Bash script to execute the docker push and cloud formation template to build elastic beanstalk.
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.
Pipeline-as-Code works really well. All our pipelines are defined in yml files, which are checked into SCM.
The ability to link multiple pipelines together is really cool. Later pipelines can declare a dependency to pick up the build artifacts of earlier ones.
Agents definition is really great. We can define multiple different kinds of environments to best suit our diverse build systems.
Consistently deploys to multiple environments with no changes to the process. Having reusable processes across environments from Dev to Production make deployments more consistent and easier to manage.
IBM UrbanCode Deploy has an easy to understand UI, to be able to review if a deployment has successfully completed or not, and details if it did not work. Using the UI is simple and easy to understand.
Scheduling and approvals are built-in as configured for the deployments. This allows us to use the same deployment process, but get approvals as needed when code is moved up to the upper environments.
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.
GoCD is easier to setup, but harder to customize at runtime. There's no way to trigger a pipeline with custom parameters.
Jenkins is more flexible at runtime. You can define multiple user-provided parameters so when user needs to trigger a build, there's a form for him/her to input the parameters.
Settings.xml need to be backed up periodically. It contains all the settings for your pipelines! We accidentally deleted before and we have to restore and re-create several missing pipelines
More straight forward use of API and allows filtering e.g., pull all pipelines triggered after this date
IBM UrbanCode Deploy has had a positive impact on making deployments much easier and quicker to do. Downtime for a system is greatly reduced and deployments go much smoother as the processes are complete repeatable and not manual.
