Item: CloudBees Continuous Integration
Rating: 9
Author: Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Jenkins CloudBees Platform is being used as the main orchestrator for all CI builds along with part usage in doing deployment orchestrator. CloudBees is being used with user personal agents along with common agents to be used across the platform. Using groovy written pipelines gives us a highly customizable CI-CD environment with all the features of enterprise architecture tools like user management, etc.

Pros and Cons

Pipeline configuration
User Management
Credenitals Management per job
Permissions per project
Continuous Integration and delivery features

File or Workspace Management
Agent configurations at master level
Better Support for issues in product

Most Important Features

Continuous Integration of builds
Customizable pipelines
Credential Management

Return on Investment

Positive - Handles number of requests
Positive - Customizations of pipelines helps integrate many type of frameworks
Negative - Cache management on agents for dependencies downloaded
Positive - credential management helps reduce configurations to be done for each project job at manual level

Alternatives Considered

IBM UrbanCode Deploy, GitLab and Digital.ai Release (formerly XebiaLabs XL Release)

Easy to lean, use, highly customizable pipelines, works well for version control, etc. Example Digital.ai gives all those features which can be done in Jenkins like builds, deployment, release management, etc. But, it requires universal templates to be created which are difficult to maintain and readable like groovy pipelines in Jenkins.

Key Insights

Do you think CloudBees Continuous Integration delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with CloudBees Continuous Integration's feature set?

Yes

Did CloudBees Continuous Integration live up to sales and marketing promises?

I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process

Did implementation of CloudBees Continuous Integration go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy CloudBees Continuous Integration again?

Yes

Other Software Used

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, Digital.ai Release (formerly XebiaLabs XL Release), Atlassian Crowd, Bitbucket, Jira Work Management (Jira Core), JFrog Artifactory

Likelihood to Recommend

For all continuous integration features like multi branch pipeline, continuous build, and deployment execution, highly customizable groovy scripting, well integration with most of repositories like SVN, GIT, etc. are some of the exceptional features which helps devOps related tasks a treat to work everyday. With some minor changes in agent configuration and handling of their configuration on master instances would reduce a lot of issues. Also, cache of maven handling on agents needs to be improved (though not related to tool but the CI pipelines). But, since this is a very mature and performant tool, we expect some out of the box functionalities to handle all such scenarios. Overall, the tool works wonders because of its highly customizable features.

Support Rating

Support seems very unreachable from my experience. They handle cases if developers are facing issues, support seems to be very limited. It's not like other tools in a market where every mail is being taken priority and responses are sent. We see a lack in this particular aspect when it comes to CloudBees Jenkins Platform.

CloudBees Continuous Integration Customer Support Pros and Cons

Pros	Cons
Knowledgeable team Kept well informed	Slow Resolution Problems left unsolved Escalation required Difficult to get immediate help Slow Initial Response

Premium Support

Not sure what kind of support is being taken for this tool.

Bug Resolution

Yes - No, the issues being raised are kept unanswered for longer period of time on the platform. Once escalated, then we get hold of team to get some insights. Also, due to our highly customizable solution and too many jobs running on platform, makes it complex for support team members too. So, not completely their fault.
But, we should have a reachable support team channel and better SLA to support such a fantastic tool.

Exceptional Examples of CloudBees Continuous Integration Support

Performance issues faced and support team got over call to help us understand the issue and what could be done to remediate it.
Good sessions taken for helping developers understand the root cause of issue and how to get that fixed.

CloudBees Jenkins... A highly customizable build solution for enterprise wide builds and deliveries

Overall Satisfaction with CloudBees Jenkins Platform