Alternatives to AWX logo

Alternatives to AWX

Tower, Jenkins, Rundeck, Ansible, and Semaphore are the most popular alternatives and competitors to AWX.
139
1

What is AWX and what are its top alternatives?

AWX provides a web-based user interface, REST API, and task engine built on top of Ansible. It is the upstream project for Tower, a commercial derivative of AWX. Ansible Towers powers enterprise automation by adding control, security and delegation capabilities to Ansible environments.
AWX is a tool in the Server Configuration and Automation category of a tech stack.
AWX is an open source tool with 14K GitHub stars and 3.4K GitHub forks. Here’s a link to AWX's open source repository on GitHub

Top Alternatives to AWX

  • Tower
    Tower

    Use all of Git's powerful feature set - in a GUI that makes you more productive. ...

  • Jenkins
    Jenkins

    In a nutshell Jenkins CI is the leading open-source continuous integration server. Built with Java, it provides over 300 plugins to support building and testing virtually any project. ...

  • Rundeck
    Rundeck

    A self-service operations platform used for support tasks, enterprise job scheduling, deployment, and more. ...

  • Ansible
    Ansible

    Ansible is an IT automation tool. It can configure systems, deploy software, and orchestrate more advanced IT tasks such as continuous deployments or zero downtime rolling updates. Ansible’s goals are foremost those of simplicity and maximum ease of use. ...

  • Semaphore
    Semaphore

    Semaphore is the fastest continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) platform on the market, powering the world’s best engineering teams. ...

  • Git
    Git

    Git is a free and open source distributed version control system designed to handle everything from small to very large projects with speed and efficiency. ...

  • GitHub
    GitHub

    GitHub is the best place to share code with friends, co-workers, classmates, and complete strangers. Over three million people use GitHub to build amazing things together. ...

  • Visual Studio Code
    Visual Studio Code

    Build and debug modern web and cloud applications. Code is free and available on your favorite platform - Linux, Mac OSX, and Windows. ...

AWX alternatives & related posts

Tower logo

Tower

213
360
80
The most powerful Git client for Mac & Windows
213
360
+ 1
80
PROS OF TOWER
  • 19
    Git
  • 16
    Just works
  • 10
    Version control
  • 6
    Awesome
  • 6
    Simple layout
  • 4
    Multiple windows
  • 3
    Automatic repo discovery
  • 3
    Multiple tabs
  • 2
    Submodule support
  • 2
    Github integration
  • 2
    Full featured client
  • 2
    Uses standard git terminology and methods
  • 2
    Gitflow support
  • 2
    Interactive stage or discard by hunks or lines
  • 1
    SAS
CONS OF TOWER
  • 5
    Expensive
  • 4
    Subscription based
  • 1
    No side by side diff
  • 0
    Merge conflict resolution impossible/unclear

related Tower posts

Cees Timmerman

Tower appears to be between GitKraken and SourceTree in detail, but gave two scary error dialogs when attempting to merge resulted in a conflict. Doing the same in SourceTree just worked and showed the conflict in its handy file view that's always visible (unlike Tower's mere "Merge branch 'X' into develop" message when the commit is selected).

Both GitKraken and Tower lack the commit hash in their history overview, requiring one to select a commit to see it.

GitKraken appears to be the only Windows 10 Git GUI suitable for night shifts, but like Tower is only free for 30 days, unlike SourceTree.

See more
Jenkins logo

Jenkins

58.3K
49.8K
2.2K
An extendable open source continuous integration server
58.3K
49.8K
+ 1
2.2K
PROS OF JENKINS
  • 523
    Hosted internally
  • 469
    Free open source
  • 318
    Great to build, deploy or launch anything async
  • 243
    Tons of integrations
  • 211
    Rich set of plugins with good documentation
  • 111
    Has support for build pipelines
  • 68
    Easy setup
  • 66
    It is open-source
  • 53
    Workflow plugin
  • 13
    Configuration as code
  • 12
    Very powerful tool
  • 11
    Many Plugins
  • 10
    Continuous Integration
  • 10
    Great flexibility
  • 9
    Git and Maven integration is better
  • 8
    100% free and open source
  • 7
    Github integration
  • 7
    Slack Integration (plugin)
  • 6
    Easy customisation
  • 6
    Self-hosted GitLab Integration (plugin)
  • 5
    Docker support
  • 5
    Pipeline API
  • 4
    Fast builds
  • 4
    Platform idnependency
  • 4
    Hosted Externally
  • 4
    Excellent docker integration
  • 3
    It`w worked
  • 3
    Customizable
  • 3
    Can be run as a Docker container
  • 3
    It's Everywhere
  • 3
    JOBDSL
  • 3
    AWS Integration
  • 2
    Easily extendable with seamless integration
  • 2
    PHP Support
  • 2
    Build PR Branch Only
  • 2
    NodeJS Support
  • 2
    Ruby/Rails Support
  • 2
    Universal controller
  • 2
    Loose Coupling
CONS OF JENKINS
  • 13
    Workarounds needed for basic requirements
  • 10
    Groovy with cumbersome syntax
  • 8
    Plugins compatibility issues
  • 7
    Lack of support
  • 7
    Limited abilities with declarative pipelines
  • 5
    No YAML syntax
  • 4
    Too tied to plugins versions

related Jenkins posts

Tymoteusz Paul
Devops guy at X20X Development LTD · | 23 upvotes · 9.7M views

Often enough I have to explain my way of going about setting up a CI/CD pipeline with multiple deployment platforms. Since I am a bit tired of yapping the same every single time, I've decided to write it up and share with the world this way, and send people to read it instead ;). I will explain it on "live-example" of how the Rome got built, basing that current methodology exists only of readme.md and wishes of good luck (as it usually is ;)).

It always starts with an app, whatever it may be and reading the readmes available while Vagrant and VirtualBox is installing and updating. Following that is the first hurdle to go over - convert all the instruction/scripts into Ansible playbook(s), and only stopping when doing a clear vagrant up or vagrant reload we will have a fully working environment. As our Vagrant environment is now functional, it's time to break it! This is the moment to look for how things can be done better (too rigid/too lose versioning? Sloppy environment setup?) and replace them with the right way to do stuff, one that won't bite us in the backside. This is the point, and the best opportunity, to upcycle the existing way of doing dev environment to produce a proper, production-grade product.

I should probably digress here for a moment and explain why. I firmly believe that the way you deploy production is the same way you should deploy develop, shy of few debugging-friendly setting. This way you avoid the discrepancy between how production work vs how development works, which almost always causes major pains in the back of the neck, and with use of proper tools should mean no more work for the developers. That's why we start with Vagrant as developer boxes should be as easy as vagrant up, but the meat of our product lies in Ansible which will do meat of the work and can be applied to almost anything: AWS, bare metal, docker, LXC, in open net, behind vpn - you name it.

We must also give proper consideration to monitoring and logging hoovering at this point. My generic answer here is to grab Elasticsearch, Kibana, and Logstash. While for different use cases there may be better solutions, this one is well battle-tested, performs reasonably and is very easy to scale both vertically (within some limits) and horizontally. Logstash rules are easy to write and are well supported in maintenance through Ansible, which as I've mentioned earlier, are at the very core of things, and creating triggers/reports and alerts based on Elastic and Kibana is generally a breeze, including some quite complex aggregations.

If we are happy with the state of the Ansible it's time to move on and put all those roles and playbooks to work. Namely, we need something to manage our CI/CD pipelines. For me, the choice is obvious: TeamCity. It's modern, robust and unlike most of the light-weight alternatives, it's transparent. What I mean by that is that it doesn't tell you how to do things, doesn't limit your ways to deploy, or test, or package for that matter. Instead, it provides a developer-friendly and rich playground for your pipelines. You can do most the same with Jenkins, but it has a quite dated look and feel to it, while also missing some key functionality that must be brought in via plugins (like quality REST API which comes built-in with TeamCity). It also comes with all the common-handy plugins like Slack or Apache Maven integration.

The exact flow between CI and CD varies too greatly from one application to another to describe, so I will outline a few rules that guide me in it: 1. Make build steps as small as possible. This way when something breaks, we know exactly where, without needing to dig and root around. 2. All security credentials besides development environment must be sources from individual Vault instances. Keys to those containers should exist only on the CI/CD box and accessible by a few people (the less the better). This is pretty self-explanatory, as anything besides dev may contain sensitive data and, at times, be public-facing. Because of that appropriate security must be present. TeamCity shines in this department with excellent secrets-management. 3. Every part of the build chain shall consume and produce artifacts. If it creates nothing, it likely shouldn't be its own build. This way if any issue shows up with any environment or version, all developer has to do it is grab appropriate artifacts to reproduce the issue locally. 4. Deployment builds should be directly tied to specific Git branches/tags. This enables much easier tracking of what caused an issue, including automated identifying and tagging the author (nothing like automated regression testing!).

Speaking of deployments, I generally try to keep it simple but also with a close eye on the wallet. Because of that, I am more than happy with AWS or another cloud provider, but also constantly peeking at the loads and do we get the value of what we are paying for. Often enough the pattern of use is not constantly erratic, but rather has a firm baseline which could be migrated away from the cloud and into bare metal boxes. That is another part where this approach strongly triumphs over the common Docker and CircleCI setup, where you are very much tied in to use cloud providers and getting out is expensive. Here to embrace bare-metal hosting all you need is a help of some container-based self-hosting software, my personal preference is with Proxmox and LXC. Following that all you must write are ansible scripts to manage hardware of Proxmox, similar way as you do for Amazon EC2 (ansible supports both greatly) and you are good to go. One does not exclude another, quite the opposite, as they can live in great synergy and cut your costs dramatically (the heavier your base load, the bigger the savings) while providing production-grade resiliency.

See more
Thierry Schellenbach

Releasing new versions of our services is done by Travis CI. Travis first runs our test suite. Once it passes, it publishes a new release binary to GitHub.

Common tasks such as installing dependencies for the Go project, or building a binary are automated using plain old Makefiles. (We know, crazy old school, right?) Our binaries are compressed using UPX.

Travis has come a long way over the past years. I used to prefer Jenkins in some cases since it was easier to debug broken builds. With the addition of the aptly named “debug build” button, Travis is now the clear winner. It’s easy to use and free for open source, with no need to maintain anything.

#ContinuousIntegration #CodeCollaborationVersionControl

See more
Rundeck logo

Rundeck

202
343
7
A platform for Self-Service Operations
202
343
+ 1
7
PROS OF RUNDECK
  • 3
    Role based access control
  • 3
    Easy to understand
  • 1
    Doesn't need containers
CONS OF RUNDECK
    Be the first to leave a con

    related Rundeck posts

    Shared insights
    on
    JenkinsJenkinsAnsibleAnsibleRundeckRundeck

    We have a lot of operations running using Rundeck (including deployments) and we also have various roles created in Ansible for infrastructure creation, which we execute using Rundeck. Rundeck we are using a community edition. Since we are already using Rundeck for executing the Ansible role, need an advice. What difference will it make if we replace Rundeck with Ansible Tower? Advantages and Disadvantages? We are using Jenkins to call Rundeck Job, same will be used for Ansible Tower if we replace Rundeck.

    See more
    Ansible logo

    Ansible

    19K
    15.4K
    1.3K
    Radically simple configuration-management, application deployment, task-execution, and multi-node orchestration engine
    19K
    15.4K
    + 1
    1.3K
    PROS OF ANSIBLE
    • 284
      Agentless
    • 210
      Great configuration
    • 199
      Simple
    • 176
      Powerful
    • 155
      Easy to learn
    • 69
      Flexible
    • 55
      Doesn't get in the way of getting s--- done
    • 35
      Makes sense
    • 30
      Super efficient and flexible
    • 27
      Powerful
    • 11
      Dynamic Inventory
    • 9
      Backed by Red Hat
    • 7
      Works with AWS
    • 6
      Cloud Oriented
    • 6
      Easy to maintain
    • 4
      Vagrant provisioner
    • 4
      Simple and powerful
    • 4
      Multi language
    • 4
      Simple
    • 4
      Because SSH
    • 4
      Procedural or declarative, or both
    • 4
      Easy
    • 3
      Consistency
    • 2
      Well-documented
    • 2
      Masterless
    • 2
      Debugging is simple
    • 2
      Merge hash to get final configuration similar to hiera
    • 2
      Fast as hell
    • 1
      Manage any OS
    • 1
      Work on windows, but difficult to manage
    • 1
      Certified Content
    CONS OF ANSIBLE
    • 8
      Dangerous
    • 5
      Hard to install
    • 3
      Doesn't Run on Windows
    • 3
      Bloated
    • 3
      Backward compatibility
    • 2
      No immutable infrastructure

    related Ansible posts

    Tymoteusz Paul
    Devops guy at X20X Development LTD · | 23 upvotes · 9.7M views

    Often enough I have to explain my way of going about setting up a CI/CD pipeline with multiple deployment platforms. Since I am a bit tired of yapping the same every single time, I've decided to write it up and share with the world this way, and send people to read it instead ;). I will explain it on "live-example" of how the Rome got built, basing that current methodology exists only of readme.md and wishes of good luck (as it usually is ;)).

    It always starts with an app, whatever it may be and reading the readmes available while Vagrant and VirtualBox is installing and updating. Following that is the first hurdle to go over - convert all the instruction/scripts into Ansible playbook(s), and only stopping when doing a clear vagrant up or vagrant reload we will have a fully working environment. As our Vagrant environment is now functional, it's time to break it! This is the moment to look for how things can be done better (too rigid/too lose versioning? Sloppy environment setup?) and replace them with the right way to do stuff, one that won't bite us in the backside. This is the point, and the best opportunity, to upcycle the existing way of doing dev environment to produce a proper, production-grade product.

    I should probably digress here for a moment and explain why. I firmly believe that the way you deploy production is the same way you should deploy develop, shy of few debugging-friendly setting. This way you avoid the discrepancy between how production work vs how development works, which almost always causes major pains in the back of the neck, and with use of proper tools should mean no more work for the developers. That's why we start with Vagrant as developer boxes should be as easy as vagrant up, but the meat of our product lies in Ansible which will do meat of the work and can be applied to almost anything: AWS, bare metal, docker, LXC, in open net, behind vpn - you name it.

    We must also give proper consideration to monitoring and logging hoovering at this point. My generic answer here is to grab Elasticsearch, Kibana, and Logstash. While for different use cases there may be better solutions, this one is well battle-tested, performs reasonably and is very easy to scale both vertically (within some limits) and horizontally. Logstash rules are easy to write and are well supported in maintenance through Ansible, which as I've mentioned earlier, are at the very core of things, and creating triggers/reports and alerts based on Elastic and Kibana is generally a breeze, including some quite complex aggregations.

    If we are happy with the state of the Ansible it's time to move on and put all those roles and playbooks to work. Namely, we need something to manage our CI/CD pipelines. For me, the choice is obvious: TeamCity. It's modern, robust and unlike most of the light-weight alternatives, it's transparent. What I mean by that is that it doesn't tell you how to do things, doesn't limit your ways to deploy, or test, or package for that matter. Instead, it provides a developer-friendly and rich playground for your pipelines. You can do most the same with Jenkins, but it has a quite dated look and feel to it, while also missing some key functionality that must be brought in via plugins (like quality REST API which comes built-in with TeamCity). It also comes with all the common-handy plugins like Slack or Apache Maven integration.

    The exact flow between CI and CD varies too greatly from one application to another to describe, so I will outline a few rules that guide me in it: 1. Make build steps as small as possible. This way when something breaks, we know exactly where, without needing to dig and root around. 2. All security credentials besides development environment must be sources from individual Vault instances. Keys to those containers should exist only on the CI/CD box and accessible by a few people (the less the better). This is pretty self-explanatory, as anything besides dev may contain sensitive data and, at times, be public-facing. Because of that appropriate security must be present. TeamCity shines in this department with excellent secrets-management. 3. Every part of the build chain shall consume and produce artifacts. If it creates nothing, it likely shouldn't be its own build. This way if any issue shows up with any environment or version, all developer has to do it is grab appropriate artifacts to reproduce the issue locally. 4. Deployment builds should be directly tied to specific Git branches/tags. This enables much easier tracking of what caused an issue, including automated identifying and tagging the author (nothing like automated regression testing!).

    Speaking of deployments, I generally try to keep it simple but also with a close eye on the wallet. Because of that, I am more than happy with AWS or another cloud provider, but also constantly peeking at the loads and do we get the value of what we are paying for. Often enough the pattern of use is not constantly erratic, but rather has a firm baseline which could be migrated away from the cloud and into bare metal boxes. That is another part where this approach strongly triumphs over the common Docker and CircleCI setup, where you are very much tied in to use cloud providers and getting out is expensive. Here to embrace bare-metal hosting all you need is a help of some container-based self-hosting software, my personal preference is with Proxmox and LXC. Following that all you must write are ansible scripts to manage hardware of Proxmox, similar way as you do for Amazon EC2 (ansible supports both greatly) and you are good to go. One does not exclude another, quite the opposite, as they can live in great synergy and cut your costs dramatically (the heavier your base load, the bigger the savings) while providing production-grade resiliency.

    See more
    Sebastian Gębski

    Heroku was a decent choice to start a business, but at some point our platform was too big, too complex & too heterogenic, so Heroku started to be a constraint, not a benefit. First, we've started containerizing our apps with Docker to eliminate "works in my machine" syndrome & uniformize the environment setup. The first orchestration was composed with Docker Compose , but at some point it made sense to move it to Kubernetes. Fortunately, we've made a very good technical decision when starting our work with containers - all the container configuration & provisions HAD (since the beginning) to be done in code (Infrastructure as Code) - we've used Terraform & Ansible for that (correspondingly). This general trend of containerisation was accompanied by another, parallel & equally big project: migrating environments from Heroku to AWS: using Amazon EC2 , Amazon EKS, Amazon S3 & Amazon RDS.

    See more
    Semaphore logo

    Semaphore

    192
    187
    83
    The continuous integration and delivery platform powering the world’s best engineering teams
    192
    187
    + 1
    83
    PROS OF SEMAPHORE
    • 20
      Easy setup
    • 15
      Fast builds
    • 14
      Free for private github repos
    • 8
      Great customer support
    • 6
      Free for open source
    • 5
      Organizations ready
    • 4
      Slack integration
    • 2
      SSH debug access
    • 2
      GitHub Integration
    • 1
      Easy to use
    • 1
      Continuous Deployment
    • 1
      Pipeline builder GUI
    • 1
      BitBucket integration
    • 1
      Docker support
    • 1
      Simple UI
    • 1
      Parallelism
    CONS OF SEMAPHORE
      Be the first to leave a con

      related Semaphore posts

      Anthony Lapenna
      Co-founder and Software Engineer at Portainer.io at Portainer.io · | 5 upvotes · 13K views

      Portainer being an open-source software, we decided to use the GitHub platform to host our codebase as well as our issue system. No need to present GitHub nowadays, it's perfectly geared with all the tools you need to manage small to large open-source projects (albeit with the usage of integrations that are easily available via its marketplace).

      In the context of the Portainer project, I'd like to highlight the tight integration of GitHub with Semaphore CI system. By leveraging this integration, we are able to automatically trigger a build of the application when a contribution is made to the project. This build is actually composed of a compilation of the program as well as the automatic creation and deployment of a Docker image directly on the DockerHub.

      This allow us to easily test and validate contributions made to the project and is a must-have for any open-source project that can leverage it.

      See more
      Git logo

      Git

      296.9K
      178.3K
      6.6K
      Fast, scalable, distributed revision control system
      296.9K
      178.3K
      + 1
      6.6K
      PROS OF GIT
      • 1.4K
        Distributed version control system
      • 1.1K
        Efficient branching and merging
      • 959
        Fast
      • 845
        Open source
      • 726
        Better than svn
      • 368
        Great command-line application
      • 306
        Simple
      • 291
        Free
      • 232
        Easy to use
      • 222
        Does not require server
      • 27
        Distributed
      • 22
        Small & Fast
      • 18
        Feature based workflow
      • 15
        Staging Area
      • 13
        Most wide-spread VSC
      • 11
        Role-based codelines
      • 11
        Disposable Experimentation
      • 7
        Frictionless Context Switching
      • 6
        Data Assurance
      • 5
        Efficient
      • 4
        Just awesome
      • 3
        Github integration
      • 3
        Easy branching and merging
      • 2
        Compatible
      • 2
        Flexible
      • 2
        Possible to lose history and commits
      • 1
        Rebase supported natively; reflog; access to plumbing
      • 1
        Light
      • 1
        Team Integration
      • 1
        Fast, scalable, distributed revision control system
      • 1
        Easy
      • 1
        Flexible, easy, Safe, and fast
      • 1
        CLI is great, but the GUI tools are awesome
      • 1
        It's what you do
      • 0
        Phinx
      CONS OF GIT
      • 16
        Hard to learn
      • 11
        Inconsistent command line interface
      • 9
        Easy to lose uncommitted work
      • 8
        Worst documentation ever possibly made
      • 5
        Awful merge handling
      • 3
        Unexistent preventive security flows
      • 3
        Rebase hell
      • 2
        Ironically even die-hard supporters screw up badly
      • 2
        When --force is disabled, cannot rebase
      • 1
        Doesn't scale for big data

      related Git posts

      Simon Reymann
      Senior Fullstack Developer at QUANTUSflow Software GmbH · | 30 upvotes · 11M views

      Our whole DevOps stack consists of the following tools:

      • GitHub (incl. GitHub Pages/Markdown for Documentation, GettingStarted and HowTo's) for collaborative review and code management tool
      • Respectively Git as revision control system
      • SourceTree as Git GUI
      • Visual Studio Code as IDE
      • CircleCI for continuous integration (automatize development process)
      • Prettier / TSLint / ESLint as code linter
      • SonarQube as quality gate
      • Docker as container management (incl. Docker Compose for multi-container application management)
      • VirtualBox for operating system simulation tests
      • Kubernetes as cluster management for docker containers
      • Heroku for deploying in test environments
      • nginx as web server (preferably used as facade server in production environment)
      • SSLMate (using OpenSSL) for certificate management
      • Amazon EC2 (incl. Amazon S3) for deploying in stage (production-like) and production environments
      • PostgreSQL as preferred database system
      • Redis as preferred in-memory database/store (great for caching)

      The main reason we have chosen Kubernetes over Docker Swarm is related to the following artifacts:

      • Key features: Easy and flexible installation, Clear dashboard, Great scaling operations, Monitoring is an integral part, Great load balancing concepts, Monitors the condition and ensures compensation in the event of failure.
      • Applications: An application can be deployed using a combination of pods, deployments, and services (or micro-services).
      • Functionality: Kubernetes as a complex installation and setup process, but it not as limited as Docker Swarm.
      • Monitoring: It supports multiple versions of logging and monitoring when the services are deployed within the cluster (Elasticsearch/Kibana (ELK), Heapster/Grafana, Sysdig cloud integration).
      • Scalability: All-in-one framework for distributed systems.
      • Other Benefits: Kubernetes is backed by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), huge community among container orchestration tools, it is an open source and modular tool that works with any OS.
      See more
      Tymoteusz Paul
      Devops guy at X20X Development LTD · | 23 upvotes · 9.7M views

      Often enough I have to explain my way of going about setting up a CI/CD pipeline with multiple deployment platforms. Since I am a bit tired of yapping the same every single time, I've decided to write it up and share with the world this way, and send people to read it instead ;). I will explain it on "live-example" of how the Rome got built, basing that current methodology exists only of readme.md and wishes of good luck (as it usually is ;)).

      It always starts with an app, whatever it may be and reading the readmes available while Vagrant and VirtualBox is installing and updating. Following that is the first hurdle to go over - convert all the instruction/scripts into Ansible playbook(s), and only stopping when doing a clear vagrant up or vagrant reload we will have a fully working environment. As our Vagrant environment is now functional, it's time to break it! This is the moment to look for how things can be done better (too rigid/too lose versioning? Sloppy environment setup?) and replace them with the right way to do stuff, one that won't bite us in the backside. This is the point, and the best opportunity, to upcycle the existing way of doing dev environment to produce a proper, production-grade product.

      I should probably digress here for a moment and explain why. I firmly believe that the way you deploy production is the same way you should deploy develop, shy of few debugging-friendly setting. This way you avoid the discrepancy between how production work vs how development works, which almost always causes major pains in the back of the neck, and with use of proper tools should mean no more work for the developers. That's why we start with Vagrant as developer boxes should be as easy as vagrant up, but the meat of our product lies in Ansible which will do meat of the work and can be applied to almost anything: AWS, bare metal, docker, LXC, in open net, behind vpn - you name it.

      We must also give proper consideration to monitoring and logging hoovering at this point. My generic answer here is to grab Elasticsearch, Kibana, and Logstash. While for different use cases there may be better solutions, this one is well battle-tested, performs reasonably and is very easy to scale both vertically (within some limits) and horizontally. Logstash rules are easy to write and are well supported in maintenance through Ansible, which as I've mentioned earlier, are at the very core of things, and creating triggers/reports and alerts based on Elastic and Kibana is generally a breeze, including some quite complex aggregations.

      If we are happy with the state of the Ansible it's time to move on and put all those roles and playbooks to work. Namely, we need something to manage our CI/CD pipelines. For me, the choice is obvious: TeamCity. It's modern, robust and unlike most of the light-weight alternatives, it's transparent. What I mean by that is that it doesn't tell you how to do things, doesn't limit your ways to deploy, or test, or package for that matter. Instead, it provides a developer-friendly and rich playground for your pipelines. You can do most the same with Jenkins, but it has a quite dated look and feel to it, while also missing some key functionality that must be brought in via plugins (like quality REST API which comes built-in with TeamCity). It also comes with all the common-handy plugins like Slack or Apache Maven integration.

      The exact flow between CI and CD varies too greatly from one application to another to describe, so I will outline a few rules that guide me in it: 1. Make build steps as small as possible. This way when something breaks, we know exactly where, without needing to dig and root around. 2. All security credentials besides development environment must be sources from individual Vault instances. Keys to those containers should exist only on the CI/CD box and accessible by a few people (the less the better). This is pretty self-explanatory, as anything besides dev may contain sensitive data and, at times, be public-facing. Because of that appropriate security must be present. TeamCity shines in this department with excellent secrets-management. 3. Every part of the build chain shall consume and produce artifacts. If it creates nothing, it likely shouldn't be its own build. This way if any issue shows up with any environment or version, all developer has to do it is grab appropriate artifacts to reproduce the issue locally. 4. Deployment builds should be directly tied to specific Git branches/tags. This enables much easier tracking of what caused an issue, including automated identifying and tagging the author (nothing like automated regression testing!).

      Speaking of deployments, I generally try to keep it simple but also with a close eye on the wallet. Because of that, I am more than happy with AWS or another cloud provider, but also constantly peeking at the loads and do we get the value of what we are paying for. Often enough the pattern of use is not constantly erratic, but rather has a firm baseline which could be migrated away from the cloud and into bare metal boxes. That is another part where this approach strongly triumphs over the common Docker and CircleCI setup, where you are very much tied in to use cloud providers and getting out is expensive. Here to embrace bare-metal hosting all you need is a help of some container-based self-hosting software, my personal preference is with Proxmox and LXC. Following that all you must write are ansible scripts to manage hardware of Proxmox, similar way as you do for Amazon EC2 (ansible supports both greatly) and you are good to go. One does not exclude another, quite the opposite, as they can live in great synergy and cut your costs dramatically (the heavier your base load, the bigger the savings) while providing production-grade resiliency.

      See more
      GitHub logo

      GitHub

      285.2K
      249.1K
      10.3K
      Powerful collaboration, review, and code management for open source and private development projects
      285.2K
      249.1K
      + 1
      10.3K
      PROS OF GITHUB
      • 1.8K
        Open source friendly
      • 1.5K
        Easy source control
      • 1.3K
        Nice UI
      • 1.1K
        Great for team collaboration
      • 867
        Easy setup
      • 504
        Issue tracker
      • 487
        Great community
      • 483
        Remote team collaboration
      • 449
        Great way to share
      • 442
        Pull request and features planning
      • 147
        Just works
      • 132
        Integrated in many tools
      • 122
        Free Public Repos
      • 116
        Github Gists
      • 113
        Github pages
      • 83
        Easy to find repos
      • 62
        Open source
      • 60
        Easy to find projects
      • 60
        It's free
      • 56
        Network effect
      • 49
        Extensive API
      • 43
        Organizations
      • 42
        Branching
      • 34
        Developer Profiles
      • 32
        Git Powered Wikis
      • 30
        Great for collaboration
      • 24
        It's fun
      • 23
        Clean interface and good integrations
      • 22
        Community SDK involvement
      • 20
        Learn from others source code
      • 16
        Because: Git
      • 14
        It integrates directly with Azure
      • 10
        Standard in Open Source collab
      • 10
        Newsfeed
      • 8
        Fast
      • 8
        Beautiful user experience
      • 8
        It integrates directly with Hipchat
      • 7
        Easy to discover new code libraries
      • 6
        Smooth integration
      • 6
        Integrations
      • 6
        Graphs
      • 6
        Nice API
      • 6
        It's awesome
      • 6
        Cloud SCM
      • 5
        Quick Onboarding
      • 5
        Remarkable uptime
      • 5
        CI Integration
      • 5
        Reliable
      • 5
        Hands down best online Git service available
      • 4
        Version Control
      • 4
        Unlimited Public Repos at no cost
      • 4
        Simple but powerful
      • 4
        Loved by developers
      • 4
        Free HTML hosting
      • 4
        Uses GIT
      • 4
        Security options
      • 4
        Easy to use and collaborate with others
      • 3
        Easy deployment via SSH
      • 3
        Ci
      • 3
        IAM
      • 3
        Nice to use
      • 2
        Easy and efficient maintainance of the projects
      • 2
        Beautiful
      • 2
        Self Hosted
      • 2
        Issues tracker
      • 2
        Easy source control and everything is backed up
      • 2
        Never dethroned
      • 2
        All in one development service
      • 2
        Good tools support
      • 2
        Free HTML hostings
      • 2
        IAM integration
      • 2
        Very Easy to Use
      • 2
        Easy to use
      • 2
        Leads the copycats
      • 2
        Free private repos
      • 1
        Profound
      • 1
        Dasf
      CONS OF GITHUB
      • 55
        Owned by micrcosoft
      • 38
        Expensive for lone developers that want private repos
      • 15
        Relatively slow product/feature release cadence
      • 10
        API scoping could be better
      • 9
        Only 3 collaborators for private repos
      • 4
        Limited featureset for issue management
      • 3
        Does not have a graph for showing history like git lens
      • 2
        GitHub Packages does not support SNAPSHOT versions
      • 1
        No multilingual interface
      • 1
        Takes a long time to commit
      • 1
        Expensive

      related GitHub posts

      Johnny Bell

      I was building a personal project that I needed to store items in a real time database. I am more comfortable with my Frontend skills than my backend so I didn't want to spend time building out anything in Ruby or Go.

      I stumbled on Firebase by #Google, and it was really all I needed. It had realtime data, an area for storing file uploads and best of all for the amount of data I needed it was free!

      I built out my application using tools I was familiar with, React for the framework, Redux.js to manage my state across components, and styled-components for the styling.

      Now as this was a project I was just working on in my free time for fun I didn't really want to pay for hosting. I did some research and I found Netlify. I had actually seen them at #ReactRally the year before and deployed a Gatsby site to Netlify already.

      Netlify was very easy to setup and link to my GitHub account you select a repo and pretty much with very little configuration you have a live site that will deploy every time you push to master.

      With the selection of these tools I was able to build out my application, connect it to a realtime database, and deploy to a live environment all with $0 spent.

      If you're looking to build out a small app I suggest giving these tools a go as you can get your idea out into the real world for absolutely no cost.

      See more

      Context: I wanted to create an end to end IoT data pipeline simulation in Google Cloud IoT Core and other GCP services. I never touched Terraform meaningfully until working on this project, and it's one of the best explorations in my development career. The documentation and syntax is incredibly human-readable and friendly. I'm used to building infrastructure through the google apis via Python , but I'm so glad past Sung did not make that decision. I was tempted to use Google Cloud Deployment Manager, but the templates were a bit convoluted by first impression. I'm glad past Sung did not make this decision either.

      Solution: Leveraging Google Cloud Build Google Cloud Run Google Cloud Bigtable Google BigQuery Google Cloud Storage Google Compute Engine along with some other fun tools, I can deploy over 40 GCP resources using Terraform!

      Check Out My Architecture: CLICK ME

      Check out the GitHub repo attached

      See more
      Visual Studio Code logo

      Visual Studio Code

      178.9K
      163.1K
      2.3K
      Build and debug modern web and cloud applications, by Microsoft
      178.9K
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      PROS OF VISUAL STUDIO CODE
      • 340
        Powerful multilanguage IDE
      • 308
        Fast
      • 193
        Front-end develop out of the box
      • 158
        Support TypeScript IntelliSense
      • 142
        Very basic but free
      • 126
        Git integration
      • 106
        Intellisense
      • 78
        Faster than Atom
      • 53
        Better ui, easy plugins, and nice git integration
      • 45
        Great Refactoring Tools
      • 44
        Good Plugins
      • 42
        Terminal
      • 38
        Superb markdown support
      • 36
        Open Source
      • 35
        Extensions
      • 26
        Awesome UI
      • 26
        Large & up-to-date extension community
      • 24
        Powerful and fast
      • 22
        Portable
      • 18
        Best code editor
      • 18
        Best editor
      • 17
        Easy to get started with
      • 15
        Lots of extensions
      • 15
        Good for begginers
      • 15
        Crossplatform
      • 15
        Built on Electron
      • 14
        Extensions for everything
      • 14
        Open, cross-platform, fast, monthly updates
      • 14
        All Languages Support
      • 13
        Easy to use and learn
      • 12
        "fast, stable & easy to use"
      • 12
        Extensible
      • 11
        Ui design is great
      • 11
        Totally customizable
      • 11
        Git out of the box
      • 11
        Useful for begginer
      • 11
        Faster edit for slow computer
      • 10
        SSH support
      • 10
        Great community
      • 10
        Fast Startup
      • 9
        Works With Almost EveryThing You Need
      • 9
        Great language support
      • 9
        Powerful Debugger
      • 9
        It has terminal and there are lots of shortcuts in it
      • 8
        Can compile and run .py files
      • 8
        Python extension is fast
      • 7
        Features rich
      • 7
        Great document formater
      • 6
        He is not Michael
      • 6
        Extension Echosystem
      • 6
        She is not Rachel
      • 6
        Awesome multi cursor support
      • 5
        VSCode.pro Course makes it easy to learn
      • 5
        Language server client
      • 5
        SFTP Workspace
      • 5
        Very proffesional
      • 5
        Easy azure
      • 4
        Has better support and more extentions for debugging
      • 4
        Supports lots of operating systems
      • 4
        Excellent as git difftool and mergetool
      • 4
        Virtualenv integration
      • 3
        Better autocompletes than Atom
      • 3
        Has more than enough languages for any developer
      • 3
        'batteries included'
      • 3
        More tools to integrate with vs
      • 3
        Emmet preinstalled
      • 2
        VS Code Server: Browser version of VS Code
      • 2
        CMake support with autocomplete
      • 2
        Microsoft
      • 2
        Customizable
      • 2
        Light
      • 2
        Big extension marketplace
      • 2
        Fast and ruby is built right in
      • 1
        File:///C:/Users/ydemi/Downloads/yuksel_demirkaya_webpa
      CONS OF VISUAL STUDIO CODE
      • 46
        Slow startup
      • 29
        Resource hog at times
      • 20
        Poor refactoring
      • 13
        Poor UI Designer
      • 11
        Weak Ui design tools
      • 10
        Poor autocomplete
      • 8
        Super Slow
      • 8
        Huge cpu usage with few installed extension
      • 8
        Microsoft sends telemetry data
      • 7
        Poor in PHP
      • 6
        It's MicroSoft
      • 3
        Poor in Python
      • 3
        No Built in Browser Preview
      • 3
        No color Intergrator
      • 3
        Very basic for java development and buggy at times
      • 3
        No built in live Preview
      • 3
        Electron
      • 2
        Bad Plugin Architecture
      • 2
        Powered by Electron
      • 1
        Terminal does not identify path vars sometimes
      • 1
        Slow C++ Language Server

      related Visual Studio Code posts

      Yshay Yaacobi

      Our first experience with .NET core was when we developed our OSS feature management platform - Tweek (https://github.com/soluto/tweek). We wanted to create a solution that is able to run anywhere (super important for OSS), has excellent performance characteristics and can fit in a multi-container architecture. We decided to implement our rule engine processor in F# , our main service was implemented in C# and other components were built using JavaScript / TypeScript and Go.

      Visual Studio Code worked really well for us as well, it worked well with all our polyglot services and the .Net core integration had great cross-platform developer experience (to be fair, F# was a bit trickier) - actually, each of our team members used a different OS (Ubuntu, macos, windows). Our production deployment ran for a time on Docker Swarm until we've decided to adopt Kubernetes with almost seamless migration process.

      After our positive experience of running .Net core workloads in containers and developing Tweek's .Net services on non-windows machines, C# had gained back some of its popularity (originally lost to Node.js), and other teams have been using it for developing microservices, k8s sidecars (like https://github.com/Soluto/airbag), cli tools, serverless functions and other projects...

      See more
      Simon Reymann
      Senior Fullstack Developer at QUANTUSflow Software GmbH · | 30 upvotes · 11M views

      Our whole DevOps stack consists of the following tools:

      • GitHub (incl. GitHub Pages/Markdown for Documentation, GettingStarted and HowTo's) for collaborative review and code management tool
      • Respectively Git as revision control system
      • SourceTree as Git GUI
      • Visual Studio Code as IDE
      • CircleCI for continuous integration (automatize development process)
      • Prettier / TSLint / ESLint as code linter
      • SonarQube as quality gate
      • Docker as container management (incl. Docker Compose for multi-container application management)
      • VirtualBox for operating system simulation tests
      • Kubernetes as cluster management for docker containers
      • Heroku for deploying in test environments
      • nginx as web server (preferably used as facade server in production environment)
      • SSLMate (using OpenSSL) for certificate management
      • Amazon EC2 (incl. Amazon S3) for deploying in stage (production-like) and production environments
      • PostgreSQL as preferred database system
      • Redis as preferred in-memory database/store (great for caching)

      The main reason we have chosen Kubernetes over Docker Swarm is related to the following artifacts:

      • Key features: Easy and flexible installation, Clear dashboard, Great scaling operations, Monitoring is an integral part, Great load balancing concepts, Monitors the condition and ensures compensation in the event of failure.
      • Applications: An application can be deployed using a combination of pods, deployments, and services (or micro-services).
      • Functionality: Kubernetes as a complex installation and setup process, but it not as limited as Docker Swarm.
      • Monitoring: It supports multiple versions of logging and monitoring when the services are deployed within the cluster (Elasticsearch/Kibana (ELK), Heapster/Grafana, Sysdig cloud integration).
      • Scalability: All-in-one framework for distributed systems.
      • Other Benefits: Kubernetes is backed by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), huge community among container orchestration tools, it is an open source and modular tool that works with any OS.
      See more