GoCD, from ThoughtWorks in Chicago, is an application lifecycle management and development tool.
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Jellyfish
Score 8.4 out of 10
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Jellyfish is an Engineering Management Platform that enables engineering leaders to align engineering work with strategic business objectives. By analyzing engineering signals and contextual business data, Jellyfish provides complete visibility into engineering organizations, the work they do, and how they operate. Jellyfish Co, headquartered in Boston, states companies like SessionM (A Mastercard Company), Medium, and Toast use Jellyfish to optimize the allocation of engineering resources to…
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.
Jellyfish allows us to understand the allocation of our efforts without time tracking. We are also able to integrate this platform with our existing ticket tracking system and can see analytics instantly! Jellyfish works well for our teams because it has an opinionated view. Jellyfish understands that the metrics for an engineering team should help you understand what your organization values and is actively working on. We can use Jellyfish in a strategic way compared to other tools like this.
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.
UI and navigation aren't very intuitive and require additional research before being able to use.
The individual developer metrics are not very useful and make the interface feel cluttered.
Overall, it takes time for the end-user to truly learn how to use the platform and navigate. There is so much information/data available that although the above is a con, we felt it still made sense, despite the learning curve.
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.
The really cool thing about Jellyfish is the integrations that it has with the other tools, which are also very common within the software development industry. Consolidating all this data and being able to see graphs, numbers, and percentages in one place gives you a better way to analyze and define better solutions to improve your software development processes.
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
