HashiCorp Packer automates the creation of machine images, coming out of the box with support to build images for Amazon EC2, CloudStack, DigitalOcean, Docker, Google Compute Engine, Microsoft Azure, QEMU, VirtualBox, and VMware.
N/A
Travis CI
Score 7.3 out of 10
N/A
Travis CI is an open source continuous integration platform, that enables users to run and test simultaneously on different environments, and automatically catch code failures and bugs.
We use packer to generate new machine images for multiple platforms on every change to our Configuration Management tools like Chef/Puppet/Ansible It's act single tool for Image building for Multi-provider like AWS/Azure/GCP Helps to achieve Dev/Prod Parity Packer itself doesn't have a state like Terraform. You can't do packer output AMI ID. If you have a scenario where you want to maintain the state for images it would be tough to manage via Packer.
TravisCI is suited for workflows involving typical software development but unfortunately I think the software needs more improvement to be up to date with current development systems and TravisCI hasn't been improving much in that space in terms of integrations.
I think they could have a cheaper personal plan. I'd love to use Travis on personal projects, but I don't want to publish them nor I can pay $69 a month for personal projects that I don't want to be open source.
There is no interface for configuring repos on Travis CI, you have to do it via a file in the repo. This make configuration very flexible, but also makes it harder for simpler projects and for small tweaks in the configuration.
TravisCI hasn't had much changes made to its software and has thus fallen behind compared to many other CI/CD applications out there. I can only give it a 5 because it does what it is supposed to do but lacks product innovation.
After the private equity firm had bought this company the innovation and support has really gone downhill a lot. I am not a fan that they have gutted the software trying to make money from it and put innovation and product development second.
There are lot of tools in market which does the job for Image creation but all of them are not complete Machine/Image as a code. All other alternatives can create Image partially. Main reason for selecting Packer are Packer is lightweight, portable, and command-line driven Packer helps keep development, staging, and production as similar as possible. Packer automates the creation of any type of machine image Multi-provider portability is the feature to die for
Jenkins is much more complicated to configure and start using. Although, one you have done that, it's extremely powerful and full of features. Maybe many more than Travis CI. As per TeamCity, I would never go back to using it. It's also complicated to configure but it is not worth the trouble. Codeship supports integration with GitHub, GitLab and BitBucket. I've only used it briefly, but it seems to be a nice tool.
It's improved my ability to deliver working code, increasing my development velocity.
It increases confidence that your own work (and those of external contributors) does not have any obvious bugs, provided you have sufficient test coverage.
It helps to ensure consistent standards across a team (you can integrate process elements like "go lint" and other style checks as part of your build).
It's zero-cost for public/open source projects, so the only investment is a few minutes setting up a build configuration file (hence the return is very high).
The .travis.yml file is a great way for onboarding new developers, since it shows how to bootstrap a build environment and run a build "from scratch".
