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Blue Ocean vs GitLab CI: What are the differences?
Introduction
When choosing between Blue Ocean and GitLab CI for your pipeline automation needs, it's essential to understand the key differences between these two popular tools to make an informed decision.
User Interface: Blue Ocean focuses on providing a more visually appealing and user-friendly interface compared to GitLab CI. It offers a cleaner and more intuitive design, making it easier for users to navigate and understand their pipelines without compromising functionality.
Integration with Jenkins and GitLab: Blue Ocean is a part of the Jenkins ecosystem and provides seamless integration with Jenkins pipelines and jobs. On the other hand, GitLab CI is tightly integrated with GitLab's repository management system, allowing for more streamlined collaboration and version control within a single platform.
Configuration Complexity: GitLab CI follows a YAML-based configuration approach, which can be more complex and verbose compared to Blue Ocean's more simplified pipeline creation process. Blue Ocean offers a visual pipeline editor that allows users to create pipelines using a drag-and-drop interface, reducing the complexity of configuration.
Community Support: GitLab CI has a robust and active community that provides support and contributes to the tool's development. Blue Ocean, being an official Jenkins plugin, also benefits from a large community of users and developers, ensuring continuous improvement and updates.
Cost: Blue Ocean is an open-source tool that is freely available to users, making it a cost-effective option for organizations looking to implement pipeline automation. GitLab CI, on the other hand, is part of GitLab's paid plans, which may not be suitable for budget-conscious users or small companies.
Scalability: GitLab CI is known for its scalability and ability to handle large-scale projects with thousands of pipelines. Blue Ocean, while suitable for smaller projects, may face limitations in terms of scalability and performance when dealing with complex and extensive pipelines.
In Summary, understanding the key differences between Blue Ocean and GitLab CI in terms of user interface, integration, configuration complexity, community support, cost, and scalability is essential for making an informed decision when choosing a pipeline automation tool.
We are a mid-size startup running Scala apps. Moving from Jenkins/EC2 to Spinnaker/EKS and looking for a tool to cover our CI/CD needs. Our code lives on GitHub, artifacts in nexus, images in ECR.
Drone is out, GitHub actions are being considered along with Circle CI and GitLab CI.
We primarily need:
- Fast SBT builds (caching)
- Low maintenance overhead (ideally serverless)
- Everything as code
- Ease of use
I think I've tried most of the CI tools out there at some point. It took me a while to get around to Buildkite because at first I didn't see much point given it seemed like you had to run the agent yourself. Eventually it dawned on me why this approach was more ingenious than I realised:
Running my app in a production (or production-like) environment was already a solved problem, because everything was already in some form of "everything as code". Having a test environment where the only difference was adding the Buildkite agent was a trivial addition.
It means that dev/test/prod parity is simple to achieve and maintain. It's also proven to be much easier to support than trying to deal with the problems that come with trying to force an app to fit into the nuances and constraints that are imposed by the containers/runtime of a CI service. When you completely control all of the environment the tests are running in you define those constraints too. It's been a great balance between a managed service and the flexibility of running it yourself.
And while none of my needs have hit the scale of Shopify (I saw one of their engineers speak about it at a conference once, I can't find the video now though 😞) it's good to know I can scale out my worker nodes to hundreds of thousands of workers to reduce the time it takes for my tests to run.
I would recommend you to consider the JFrog Platform that includes JFrog Pipelines - it will allow you to manage the full artifact life cycle for your sbt, docker and other technologies, and automate all of your CI and CD using cloud native declarative yaml pipelines. Will integrate smoothly with all your other toolset.
more configurable to setup ci/cd: * It can provide caching when build sbt, just add this section to yml file * Easy to use, many documentation
Weakness: * Need use gitlab as repository to bring more powerful configuration
Buddy is one of the most easy-to-use tools for CI I ever met. When I needed to set up the pipeline I was really impressed with how easy it is to create it with Buddy with only a few moments. It's literally like: 1. Add repo 2. Click - Click - Click 3. You're done and your app is on prod :D The top feature that I've found is a simple integration with different notification channels - not only Slack (which is the one by default), but Telegram and Discord. The support is also neat - guys respond pretty quickly on even a small issue.
Pros of Blue Ocean
- Beautiful interface7
Pros of GitLab CI
- Robust CI with awesome Docker support22
- Simple configuration13
- All in one solution9
- Source Control and CI in one place7
- Integrated with VCS on commit5
- Free and open source5
- Easy to configure own build server i.e. GitLab-Runner5
- Hosted internally2
- Built-in Docker Registry1
- Built-in support of Review Apps1
- Pipeline could be started manually1
- Enable or disable pipeline by using env variables1
- Gitlab templates could be shared across logical group1
- Easy to setup the dedicated runner to particular job1
- Built-in support of Kubernetes1
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Cons of Blue Ocean
Cons of GitLab CI
- Works best with GitLab repositories2
