IBM UrbanCode Deploy is a release management / deployment automation offering.
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Jenkins
Score 8.3 out of 10
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
