Racket Alternatives logo

Racket Alternatives

Explore the pros & cons of Racket and its alternatives. Learn about popular competitors like Haskell, Common Lisp, and Clojure
89
54

What is Racket and what are its top alternatives?

Racket is a general-purpose programming language that is both functional and imperative, and is specifically designed for creating and running programs. It features a powerful macro system that allows for language extension, as well as a wide range of libraries for various applications. Racket is known for its ease of use and readability, making it a popular choice for beginners and experienced programmers alike. However, Racket may be seen as less performant compared to some other languages, and its niche focus on language-oriented programming may not appeal to all developers.

  1. Scheme Programming Language: Scheme is a dialect of Lisp that shares many similarities with Racket. It is known for its simplicity and minimalism, making it a popular choice for academic and research purposes. Pros include its straightforward syntax and functional programming paradigm, while cons may include a lack of extensive libraries compared to Racket.
  2. Haskell: Haskell is a purely functional programming language known for its strong static typing system and innovative features such as lazy evaluation. Key features include type inference and high-level abstractions, while potential drawbacks may include a steep learning curve for beginners.
  3. Clojure: Clojure is a dialect of Lisp that runs on the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) and is designed for concurrent programming. It offers persistent data structures and immutable values, which can lead to more reliable and scalable code. Pros include seamless Java interoperability, while cons may include a smaller community compared to Racket.
  4. Python: Python is a versatile high-level programming language known for its readability and efficiency. It offers a large standard library and support for multiple programming paradigms, making it a popular choice for a wide range of applications. Key features include dynamic typing and extensive documentation, while potential drawbacks may include performance limitations compared to compiled languages like Racket.
  5. Scala: Scala is a statically typed programming language that combines object-oriented and functional programming paradigms. It runs on the JVM and is known for its expressive syntax and scalability. Pros include seamless Java interoperability and strong static typing, while cons may include a more complex learning curve compared to Racket.
  6. Go: Go is a statically typed programming language developed by Google, known for its simplicity, efficiency, and built-in support for concurrent programming. It offers features such as goroutines and concurrency primitives, making it a suitable choice for high-performance applications. Key features include fast compilation times and a growing community, while potential drawbacks may include a lack of generics and a stricter error handling approach compared to Racket.
  7. Swift: Swift is a powerful and intuitive programming language developed by Apple for building iOS, macOS, watchOS, and tvOS applications. It offers a modern syntax, strong typing system, and seamless interoperability with Objective-C. Pros include high performance and safety features, while cons may include limited support for platforms outside the Apple ecosystem compared to Racket.
  8. Julia: Julia is a high-level dynamic programming language designed for numerical and scientific computing. It offers high performance through just-in-time (JIT) compilation and a rich ecosystem of packages for data analysis, machine learning, and more. Key features include multiple dispatch and a familiar syntax for developers coming from languages like Racket, while potential drawbacks may include a smaller community and less maturity compared to Racket.
  9. Elixir: Elixir is a functional programming language built on top of the Erlang virtual machine, known for its fault-tolerant and distributed capabilities. It offers a scalable and maintainable codebase through features like lightweight processes and pattern matching. Pros include high concurrency and fault tolerance, while cons may include a steeper learning curve for developers new to functional programming compared to Racket.
  10. TypeScript: TypeScript is a statically typed superset of JavaScript that offers optional static typing and advanced features such as interfaces and decorators. It aims to provide a more robust development experience compared to plain JavaScript, with features like type checking and code refactoring. Key features include strong typing support and compatibility with existing JavaScript codebases, while potential drawbacks may include a more verbose syntax compared to languages like Racket.

Top Alternatives to Racket

  • Haskell
    Haskell

    It is a general purpose language that can be used in any domain and use case, it is ideally suited for proprietary business logic and data analysis, fast prototyping and enhancing existing software environments with correct code, performance and scalability. ...

  • Common Lisp
    Common Lisp

    Lisp was originally created as a practical mathematical notation for computer programs, influenced by the notation of Alonzo Church's lambda calculus. It quickly became the favored programming language for artificial intelligence (AI) research. As one of the earliest programming languages, Lisp pioneered many ideas in computer science, including tree data structures, automatic storage management, dynamic typing, conditionals, higher-order functions, recursion, and the self-hosting compiler. [source: wikipedia] ...

  • Clojure
    Clojure

    Clojure is designed to be a general-purpose language, combining the approachability and interactive development of a scripting language with an efficient and robust infrastructure for multithreaded programming. Clojure is a compiled language - it compiles directly to JVM bytecode, yet remains completely dynamic. Clojure is a dialect of Lisp, and shares with Lisp the code-as-data philosophy and a powerful macro system. ...

  • Python
    Python

    Python is a general purpose programming language created by Guido Van Rossum. Python is most praised for its elegant syntax and readable code, if you are just beginning your programming career python suits you best. ...

  • OCaml
    OCaml

    It is an industrial strength programming language supporting functional, imperative and object-oriented styles. It is the technology of choice in companies where a single mistake can cost millions and speed matters, ...

  • Rust
    Rust

    Rust is a systems programming language that combines strong compile-time correctness guarantees with fast performance. It improves upon the ideas of other systems languages like C++ by providing guaranteed memory safety (no crashes, no data races) and complete control over the lifecycle of memory. ...

  • 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. ...

Racket alternatives & related posts

Haskell logo

Haskell

1.4K
1.2K
527
An advanced purely-functional programming language
1.4K
1.2K
+ 1
527
PROS OF HASKELL
  • 90
    Purely-functional programming
  • 66
    Statically typed
  • 59
    Type-safe
  • 39
    Open source
  • 38
    Great community
  • 31
    Built-in concurrency
  • 30
    Built-in parallelism
  • 30
    Composable
  • 24
    Referentially transparent
  • 20
    Generics
  • 15
    Type inference
  • 15
    Intellectual satisfaction
  • 12
    If it compiles, it's correct
  • 8
    Flexible
  • 8
    Monads
  • 5
    Great type system
  • 4
    Proposition testing with QuickCheck
  • 4
    One of the most powerful languages *(see blub paradox)*
  • 4
    Purely-functional Programming
  • 3
    Highly expressive, type-safe, fast development time
  • 3
    Pattern matching and completeness checking
  • 3
    Great maintainability of the code
  • 3
    Fun
  • 3
    Reliable
  • 2
    Best in class thinking tool
  • 2
    Kind system
  • 2
    Better type-safe than sorry
  • 2
    Type classes
  • 1
    Predictable
  • 1
    Orthogonality
CONS OF HASKELL
  • 9
    Too much distraction in language extensions
  • 8
    Error messages can be very confusing
  • 5
    Libraries have poor documentation
  • 3
    No good ABI
  • 3
    No best practices
  • 2
    Poor packaging for apps written in it for Linux distros
  • 2
    Sometimes performance is unpredictable
  • 1
    Slow compilation
  • 1
    Monads are hard to understand

related Haskell posts

Shared insights
on
HaskellHaskellScalaScala

Why I am using Haskell in my free time?

I have 3 reasons for it. I am looking for:

Fun.

Improve functional programming skill.

Improve problem-solving skill.

Laziness and mathematical abstractions behind Haskell makes it a wonderful language.

It is Pure functional, it helps me to write better Scala code.

Highly expressive language gives elegant ways to solve coding puzzle.

See more
Common Lisp logo

Common Lisp

263
253
145
The modern, multi-paradigm, high-performance, compiled, ANSI-standardized descendant of the long-running family of Lisp programming languages
263
253
+ 1
145
PROS OF COMMON LISP
  • 24
    Flexibility
  • 22
    High-performance
  • 17
    Comfortable: garbage collection, closures, macros, REPL
  • 13
    Stable
  • 12
    Lisp
  • 8
    Code is data
  • 6
    Can integrate with C (via CFFI)
  • 6
    Multi paradigm
  • 5
    Lisp is fun
  • 4
    Macros
  • 4
    Easy Setup
  • 3
    Parentheses
  • 3
    Open source
  • 3
    Purelly functional
  • 3
    Elegant
  • 1
    DSLs
  • 1
    Multiple values
  • 1
    CLOS/MOP
  • 1
    Clean semantics
  • 1
    Will still be relevant 100 years from now
  • 1
    Still decades ahead of almost all programming languages
  • 1
    Best programming language
  • 1
    Simple syntax
  • 1
    Powerful
  • 1
    Generic functions
  • 1
    Can implement almost any feature as a library
  • 1
    Formal specification, multiple implementations
CONS OF COMMON LISP
  • 4
    Too many Parentheses
  • 3
    Standard did not evolve since 1994
  • 2
    Small library ecosystem
  • 2
    No hygienic macros
  • 1
    Inadequate community infrastructure
  • 1
    Ultra-conservative community

related Common Lisp posts

Clojure logo

Clojure

1.9K
1.4K
1.1K
A dynamic programming language that targets the Java Virtual Machine
1.9K
1.4K
+ 1
1.1K
PROS OF CLOJURE
  • 117
    It is a lisp
  • 100
    Persistent data structures
  • 100
    Concise syntax
  • 90
    jvm-based language
  • 89
    Concurrency
  • 81
    Interactive repl
  • 76
    Code is data
  • 61
    Open source
  • 61
    Lazy data structures
  • 57
    Macros
  • 49
    Functional
  • 23
    Simplistic
  • 22
    Immutable by default
  • 20
    Excellent collections
  • 19
    Fast-growing community
  • 15
    Multiple host languages
  • 15
    Simple (not easy!)
  • 15
    Practical Lisp
  • 10
    Because it's really fun to use
  • 10
    Addictive
  • 9
    Community
  • 9
    Web friendly
  • 9
    Rapid development
  • 9
    It creates Reusable code
  • 8
    Minimalist
  • 6
    Programmable programming language
  • 6
    Java interop
  • 5
    Regained interest in programming
  • 4
    Compiles to JavaScript
  • 3
    Share a lot of code with clojurescript/use on frontend
  • 3
    EDN
  • 1
    Clojurescript
CONS OF CLOJURE
  • 11
    Cryptic stacktraces
  • 5
    Need to wrap basically every java lib
  • 4
    Toxic community
  • 3
    Good code heavily relies on local conventions
  • 3
    Tonns of abandonware
  • 3
    Slow application startup
  • 1
    Usable only with REPL
  • 1
    Hiring issues
  • 1
    It's a lisp
  • 1
    Bad documented libs
  • 1
    Macros are overused by devs
  • 1
    Tricky profiling
  • 1
    IDE with high learning curve
  • 1
    Configuration bolierplate
  • 1
    Conservative community
  • 0
    Have no good and fast fmt

related Clojure posts

Stitch is run entirely on AWS. All of our transactional databases are run with Amazon RDS, and we rely on Amazon S3 for data persistence in various stages of our pipeline. Our product integrates with Amazon Redshift as a data destination, and we also use Redshift as an internal data warehouse (powered by Stitch, of course).

The majority of our services run on stateless Amazon EC2 instances that are managed by AWS OpsWorks. We recently introduced Kubernetes into our infrastructure to run the scheduled jobs that execute Singer code to extract data from various sources. Although we tend to be wary of shiny new toys, Kubernetes has proven to be a good fit for this problem, and its stability, strong community and helpful tooling have made it easy for us to incorporate into our operations.

While we continue to be happy with Clojure for our internal services, we felt that its relatively narrow adoption could impede Singer's growth. We chose Python both because it is well suited to the task, and it seems to have reached critical mass among data engineers. All that being said, the Singer spec is language agnostic, and integrations and libraries have been developed in JavaScript, Go, and Clojure.

See more
Robert Zuber
Shared insights
on
CircleCICircleCIClojureClojureRailsRails
at

Most of CircleCI is written in Clojure and it has been this way since almost the beginning. Early development included Rails, but by the time that CircleCI was released to the public, it was written entirely in Clojure. Clojure is still at our platform’s core. It helps having a common language across much of our stack to allow for our engineers to move between layers of the stack without much overhead.

See more
Python logo

Python

244.4K
199.4K
6.9K
A clear and powerful object-oriented programming language, comparable to Perl, Ruby, Scheme, or Java.
244.4K
199.4K
+ 1
6.9K
PROS OF PYTHON
  • 1.2K
    Great libraries
  • 962
    Readable code
  • 847
    Beautiful code
  • 788
    Rapid development
  • 690
    Large community
  • 438
    Open source
  • 393
    Elegant
  • 282
    Great community
  • 272
    Object oriented
  • 220
    Dynamic typing
  • 77
    Great standard library
  • 60
    Very fast
  • 55
    Functional programming
  • 49
    Easy to learn
  • 45
    Scientific computing
  • 35
    Great documentation
  • 29
    Productivity
  • 28
    Easy to read
  • 28
    Matlab alternative
  • 24
    Simple is better than complex
  • 20
    It's the way I think
  • 19
    Imperative
  • 18
    Free
  • 18
    Very programmer and non-programmer friendly
  • 17
    Powerfull language
  • 17
    Machine learning support
  • 16
    Fast and simple
  • 14
    Scripting
  • 12
    Explicit is better than implicit
  • 11
    Ease of development
  • 10
    Clear and easy and powerfull
  • 9
    Unlimited power
  • 8
    It's lean and fun to code
  • 8
    Import antigravity
  • 7
    Print "life is short, use python"
  • 7
    Python has great libraries for data processing
  • 6
    Although practicality beats purity
  • 6
    Now is better than never
  • 6
    Great for tooling
  • 6
    Readability counts
  • 6
    Rapid Prototyping
  • 6
    I love snakes
  • 6
    Flat is better than nested
  • 6
    Fast coding and good for competitions
  • 6
    There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious
  • 6
    High Documented language
  • 5
    Great for analytics
  • 5
    Lists, tuples, dictionaries
  • 4
    Easy to learn and use
  • 4
    Simple and easy to learn
  • 4
    Easy to setup and run smooth
  • 4
    Web scraping
  • 4
    CG industry needs
  • 4
    Socially engaged community
  • 4
    Complex is better than complicated
  • 4
    Multiple Inheritence
  • 4
    Beautiful is better than ugly
  • 4
    Plotting
  • 3
    Many types of collections
  • 3
    Flexible and easy
  • 3
    It is Very easy , simple and will you be love programmi
  • 3
    If the implementation is hard to explain, it's a bad id
  • 3
    Special cases aren't special enough to break the rules
  • 3
    Pip install everything
  • 3
    List comprehensions
  • 3
    No cruft
  • 3
    Generators
  • 3
    Import this
  • 3
    If the implementation is easy to explain, it may be a g
  • 2
    Can understand easily who are new to programming
  • 2
    Batteries included
  • 2
    Securit
  • 2
    Good for hacking
  • 2
    Better outcome
  • 2
    Only one way to do it
  • 2
    Because of Netflix
  • 2
    A-to-Z
  • 2
    Should START with this but not STICK with This
  • 2
    Powerful language for AI
  • 1
    Automation friendly
  • 1
    Sexy af
  • 1
    Slow
  • 1
    Procedural programming
  • 0
    Ni
  • 0
    Powerful
  • 0
    Keep it simple
CONS OF PYTHON
  • 53
    Still divided between python 2 and python 3
  • 28
    Performance impact
  • 26
    Poor syntax for anonymous functions
  • 22
    GIL
  • 19
    Package management is a mess
  • 14
    Too imperative-oriented
  • 12
    Hard to understand
  • 12
    Dynamic typing
  • 12
    Very slow
  • 8
    Indentations matter a lot
  • 8
    Not everything is expression
  • 7
    Incredibly slow
  • 7
    Explicit self parameter in methods
  • 6
    Requires C functions for dynamic modules
  • 6
    Poor DSL capabilities
  • 6
    No anonymous functions
  • 5
    Fake object-oriented programming
  • 5
    Threading
  • 5
    The "lisp style" whitespaces
  • 5
    Official documentation is unclear.
  • 5
    Hard to obfuscate
  • 5
    Circular import
  • 4
    Lack of Syntax Sugar leads to "the pyramid of doom"
  • 4
    The benevolent-dictator-for-life quit
  • 4
    Not suitable for autocomplete
  • 2
    Meta classes
  • 1
    Training wheels (forced indentation)

related Python posts

Conor Myhrvold
Tech Brand Mgr, Office of CTO at Uber · | 44 upvotes · 12.6M views

How Uber developed the open source, end-to-end distributed tracing Jaeger , now a CNCF project:

Distributed tracing is quickly becoming a must-have component in the tools that organizations use to monitor their complex, microservice-based architectures. At Uber, our open source distributed tracing system Jaeger saw large-scale internal adoption throughout 2016, integrated into hundreds of microservices and now recording thousands of traces every second.

Here is the story of how we got here, from investigating off-the-shelf solutions like Zipkin, to why we switched from pull to push architecture, and how distributed tracing will continue to evolve:

https://eng.uber.com/distributed-tracing/

(GitHub Pages : https://www.jaegertracing.io/, GitHub: https://github.com/jaegertracing/jaeger)

Bindings/Operator: Python Java Node.js Go C++ Kubernetes JavaScript OpenShift C# Apache Spark

See more
Nick Parsons
Building cool things on the internet 🛠️ at Stream · | 35 upvotes · 4.3M views

Winds 2.0 is an open source Podcast/RSS reader developed by Stream with a core goal to enable a wide range of developers to contribute.

We chose JavaScript because nearly every developer knows or can, at the very least, read JavaScript. With ES6 and Node.js v10.x.x, it’s become a very capable language. Async/Await is powerful and easy to use (Async/Await vs Promises). Babel allows us to experiment with next-generation JavaScript (features that are not in the official JavaScript spec yet). Yarn allows us to consistently install packages quickly (and is filled with tons of new tricks)

We’re using JavaScript for everything – both front and backend. Most of our team is experienced with Go and Python, so Node was not an obvious choice for this app.

Sure... there will be haters who refuse to acknowledge that there is anything remotely positive about JavaScript (there are even rants on Hacker News about Node.js); however, without writing completely in JavaScript, we would not have seen the results we did.

#FrameworksFullStack #Languages

See more
OCaml logo

OCaml

313
184
28
A general purpose industrial-strength programming language
313
184
+ 1
28
PROS OF OCAML
  • 7
    Satisfying to write
  • 6
    Pattern matching
  • 4
    Also has OOP
  • 4
    Very practical
  • 3
    Easy syntax
  • 3
    Extremely powerful type inference
  • 1
    Efficient compiler
CONS OF OCAML
  • 3
    Small community
  • 1
    Royal pain in the neck to compile large programs

related OCaml posts

Rust logo

Rust

5.8K
4.9K
1.2K
A safe, concurrent, practical language
5.8K
4.9K
+ 1
1.2K
PROS OF RUST
  • 145
    Guaranteed memory safety
  • 132
    Fast
  • 88
    Open source
  • 75
    Minimal runtime
  • 71
    Pattern matching
  • 63
    Type inference
  • 57
    Concurrent
  • 56
    Algebraic data types
  • 47
    Efficient C bindings
  • 43
    Practical
  • 37
    Best advances in languages in 20 years
  • 32
    Safe, fast, easy + friendly community
  • 30
    Fix for C/C++
  • 25
    Stablity
  • 24
    Zero-cost abstractions
  • 23
    Closures
  • 20
    Extensive compiler checks
  • 20
    Great community
  • 18
    Async/await
  • 18
    No NULL type
  • 15
    Completely cross platform: Windows, Linux, Android
  • 15
    No Garbage Collection
  • 14
    High-performance
  • 14
    Great documentations
  • 12
    Super fast
  • 12
    High performance
  • 12
    Generics
  • 11
    Guaranteed thread data race safety
  • 11
    Safety no runtime crashes
  • 11
    Macros
  • 11
    Fearless concurrency
  • 10
    Compiler can generate Webassembly
  • 10
    Helpful compiler
  • 9
    RLS provides great IDE support
  • 9
    Prevents data races
  • 9
    Easy Deployment
  • 8
    Painless dependency management
  • 8
    Real multithreading
  • 7
    Good package management
  • 5
    Support on Other Languages
CONS OF RUST
  • 28
    Hard to learn
  • 24
    Ownership learning curve
  • 12
    Unfriendly, verbose syntax
  • 4
    High size of builded executable
  • 4
    Many type operations make it difficult to follow
  • 4
    No jobs
  • 4
    Variable shadowing
  • 1
    Use it only for timeoass not in production

related Rust posts

Caue Carvalho
Shared insights
on
RustRustGolangGolangPythonPythonRubyRubyC#C#

Hello!

I'm a developer for over 9 years, and most of this time I've been working with C# and it is paying my bills until nowadays. But I'm seeking to learn other languages and expand the possibilities for the next years.

Now the question... I know Ruby is far from dead but is it still worth investing time in learning it? Or would be better to take Python, Golang, or even Rust? Or maybe another language.

Thanks in advance.

See more
James Cunningham
Operations Engineer at Sentry · | 18 upvotes · 320.4K views
Shared insights
on
PythonPythonRustRust
at

Sentry's event processing pipeline, which is responsible for handling all of the ingested event data that makes it through to our offline task processing, is written primarily in Python.

For particularly intense code paths, like our source map processing pipeline, we have begun re-writing those bits in Rust. Rust’s lack of garbage collection makes it a particularly convenient language for embedding in Python. It allows us to easily build a Python extension where all memory is managed from the Python side (if the Python wrapper gets collected by the Python GC we clean up the Rust object as well).

See more
Git logo

Git

296.9K
178.2K
6.6K
Fast, scalable, distributed revision control system
296.9K
178.2K
+ 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

285.1K
249K
10.3K
Powerful collaboration, review, and code management for open source and private development projects
285.1K
249K
+ 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