Jenkins vs. Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) vs. TeamCity

Jenkins is a highly customizable CI/CD tool with excellent community support. One can use Jenkins to build and deploy monolith services to microservices with ease. It can handle multiple "builds" per agent simultaneously, but the process can be resource hungry, and you need some impressive specs server for that. With Jenkins, you can automate almost any task. Also, as it is an open source, we can save a load of money by not spending on enterprise CI/CD tools.

Incentivized

KVM is the best solution in the case you need to test and turn up any virtual environment with limited vCPU/RAM resources. The obvious area of its use is a network environment when we want to avoid being tied to one type of hardware/vendor and being able to swap from one instance to another with no downtimes. The use of a vSwitch (that supports VLAN tagging) is a significant bonus for network engineers that some other hypervisors do not provide.

Incentivized

TeamCity is very quick and straightforward to get up and running. A new server and a handful of agents could be brought online in easily under an hour. The professional tier is completely free, full-featured, and offers a huge amount of growth potential. TeamCity does exceptionally well in a small-scale business or enterprise setting.

Incentivized

• Automated Builds: Jenkins is configured to monitor the version control system for new pull requests. Once a pull request is created, Jenkins automatically triggers a build process. It checks out the code, compiles it, and performs any necessary build steps specified in the configuration.
• Unit Testing: Jenkins runs the suite of unit tests defined for the project. These tests verify the functionality of individual components and catch any regressions or errors. If any unit tests fail, Jenkins marks the build as unsuccessful, and the developer is notified to fix the issues.
• Code Analysis: Jenkins integrates with code analysis tools like SonarQube or Checkstyle. It analyzes the code for quality, adherence to coding standards, and potential bugs or vulnerabilities. The results are reported back to the developer and the product review team for further inspection.

Incentivized

• KVM is really good at providing fast and reliable virtualization for Linux guests
• Since KVM is a kernel module, every VM is a Linux process which can be managed by Linux system tools
• KVM integrates very well with the management framework libvirt, which is why KVM can be integrated in automation tools as well

Incentivized

• TeamCity provides a great integration with git, especially Bitbucket.
• When a new code release (build) fails TeamCity has a great tool for investigation and troubleshooting.
• TeamCity provides a user-friendly interface. While some technical knowledge is required to use TeamCity, the design helps simply things.

Incentivized

• The UI could be slightly better, it feels kind of like the 90s, but it works well.
• An easier way to filter jobs other than views on the dashboard.
• An easier way to read the console logs when tests do fail.

Incentivized

• KVM itself doesn't ship with a management interface
• KVM itself is a bit complicated to handle
• KVM needs Qemu to virtualize Windows guests

Incentivized

• The customization is still fairly complex and is best managed by a dev support team. There is great flexibility, but with flexibility comes responsibility. It isn't always obvious to a developer how to make simple customizations.
• Sometimes the process for dealing with errors in the process isn't obvious. Some paths to rerunning steps redo dependencies unnecessarily while other paths that don't are less obvious.

Incentivized

We have a certain buy-in as we have made a lot of integrations and useful tools around jenkins, so it would cost us quite some time to change to another tool. Besides that, it is very versatile, and once you have things set up, it feels unnecessary to change tool. It is also a plus that it is open source.

Incentivized

Jenkins streamlines development and provides end to end automated integration and deployment. It even supports Docker and Kubernetes using which container instances can be managed effectively. It is easy to add documentation and apply role based access to files and services using Jenkins giving full control to the users. Any deviation can be easily tracked using the audit logs.

Incentivized

It does the job and stays out of the way. The specifics of usability relies on the implementation, but with things like Icarus and libvirt, things are standardizing nicely.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

TeamCity runs really well, even when sharing a small instance with other applications. The user interface adequately conveys important information without being overly bloated, and it is snappy. There isn't any significant overhead to build agents or unit test runners that we have measured.

Incentivized

As with all open source solutions, the support can be minimal and the information that you can find online can at times be misleading. Support may be one of the only real downsides to the overall software package. The user community can be helpful and is needed as the product is not the most user-friendly thing we have used.

Incentivized

It is worth well the time to setup Jenkins in a docker container. It is also well worth to take the time to move any "Jenkins configuration" into Jenkinsfiles and not take shortcuts.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

It is a very reliable solution that can be used for x86 architecture virtualization with low overhead. It is a free and open source software. Easy to use withOpenStack.

Incentivized

TeamCity is a great on-premise Continuous Integration tool. Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) is a hosted SAAS application in Microsoft's Cloud. VSTS is a Source Code Repository, Build and Release System, and Agile Project Management Platform - whereas TeamCity is a Build and Release System only. TeamCity's interface is easier to use than VSTS, and neither have a great deployment pipeline solution. But VSTS's natural integration with Microsoft products, Microsoft's Cloud, Integration with Azure Active Directory, and free, private, Source Code repository - offer additional features and capabilities not available with Team City alone.

Incentivized

• Faster Time-to-Market: Jenkins automate the build, testing, and deployment process, enabling faster feedback and continuous improvement.
• Improved Quality: Jenkins automatically run unit tests and integration tests, ensuring that code changes meet the necessary quality standards.
• Cost Savings: Jenkins is an open-source tool that is free to use

Incentivized

• Fast provisioning of new servers.
• Huge drop of the cost of servers compared to bare metal.
• Easy upgrades of resources, sometimes now even requiring a server restart.

Incentivized

• TeamCity has greatly improved team efficiency by streamlining our production and pre-production pipelines. We moved to TeamCity after seeing other teams have more success with it than we had with other tools.
• TeamCity has helped the reliability of our product by easily allowing us to integrate unit testing, as well as full integration testing. This was not possible with other tools given our corporate firewall.
• TeamCity's ability to include Docker containers in the pipeline steps has been crucial in improving our efficiency and reliability.

Incentivized