German company SUSE offers SUSE Manager, a software defined infrastructure Linux server configuration management tool supporting patching, provisioning of Linux servers, and related actions.
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TeamCity
Score 7.9 out of 10
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TeamCity is a continuous integration server from Czeck company JetBrains.
In our specific use case, SUSE Manager is extremely useful. We're having a large landscape that is divided into intake, development, quality and production with a couple of different SUSE flavours that need to be automatically rolled out, configured, patched and maintained, everything from up to date repositories that are cloned on a daily basis straight from SUSE.
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.
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.
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.
SUSE Manager provided a top-tier support person on site to us for two days to help integration. We did all the standard stuff they help with before he arrived. We were able to use him to get all the tricky stuff identified and solved in the short time we had. Had they sent us a lower-tier guy, it would have been a waste. I was impressed they sent such knowledgeable person.
The other competitors also have a good platform and service, but we went with SUSE due to cost. The price was best and we needed to keep under a certain budget. The functionality was perfect for what we needed so we took the step forward. This allows us to manage our Linux environment within the manager and update or deploy specific tasks to each as needed.
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.
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.
