GoCD, from ThoughtWorks in Chicago, is an application lifecycle management and development tool.
N/A
Jenkins
Score 8.3 out of 10
N/A
Jenkins is an open source automation server. Jenkins provides hundreds of plugins to support building, deploying and automating any project. As an extensible automation server, Jenkins can be used as a simple CI server or turned into a continuous delivery hub for any project.
I prefer using GoCD compared to Jenkins. The UI makes sense, I like the simplicity to hit the 'Play' button for a straightforward deployment of the 'Play +' if you need to override some settings when deploying whereas Jenkins, you have the whole page for each pipeline. The …
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 …
The selection of Jenkins over these tools was driven by its huge plugin ecosystem and the robust support from its community. Jenkins has a long-established presence in the CI/CD landscape, making it a reliable and mature choice overall. It needs to be customized and some time …
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.
It is really good when used along with Agile development. It can help control the dev/QA/staging environments and test the application easily without the code getting into a production environment. At the same time, if you only have small tasks, setting up Jenkins is a heavy task and too over-engineered. The user experience for simple tasks is not that great.
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.
User Interface: The Jenkins user interface can be complex and overwhelming for new users. Improving the user experience and making it more intuitive would help streamline the onboarding process and enhance usability for both beginners and experienced users.
Configuration Management: Managing and configuring Jenkins can be challenging, especially when dealing with large and complex projects. Simplifying the configuration process and providing more user-friendly options for managing pipelines and jobs would be beneficial.
Scalability: As projects grow and the number of builds and jobs increases, Jenkins can experience performance issues and scalability challenges. Optimizing Jenkins for larger-scale deployments and providing better support for distributed builds and parallelization would help address these limitations.
No, when we integrated this with GitHub, it becomes more easy and smart to manage and control our workforce. Our distributed workforce is now streamlined to a single bucket. All of our codes and production outputs are now automatically synced with all the workers. There are many cases when our in-house team makes changes in the release, our remote workers make another release with other environment variables. So it is better to get all of the work in control.
There is a large development community - but it is shifting as people move towards other tools. A lot of companies still use Jenkins and will build propriety tools, which doesn't help any of the open-source community. Jenkins has a lot of help and support online, but other, more modern, alternatives will have better support for newer tech.
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.
Overall, Jenkins is the easiest platform for someone who has no experience to come in and use effectively. We can get a junior engineer into Jenkins, give them access, and point them in the right direction with minimal hand-holding. The competing products I have used (TravisCI/GitLab/Azure) provide other options but can obfuscate the process due to the lack of straightforward simplicity. In other areas (capability, power, customization), Jenkins keeps up with the competition and, in some areas, like customization, exceeds others.
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
We run about 30 test projects through Jenkins every day, multiple times a day; this allows us to focus on new tests rather than manually running all these tests.
We rely heavily on reporting capabilities and email notifications; we have some jobs that send emails every time they run so we know if there is an issue with any of our services.
