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  1. Stackups
  2. DevOps
  3. Continuous Integration
  4. Continuous Integration
  5. Blue Ocean vs Jenkins X

Blue Ocean vs Jenkins X

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Blue Ocean
Blue Ocean
Stacks92
Followers167
Votes7
GitHub Stars2.9K
Forks537
Jenkins X
Jenkins X
Stacks147
Followers370
Votes16
GitHub Stars4.7K
Forks800

Blue Ocean vs Jenkins X: What are the differences?

Introduction

Blue Ocean and Jenkins X are both continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) tools aimed at streamlining software development processes. While they share some similarities, there are key differences between the two.

  1. User Interface: Blue Ocean provides a modern, intuitive user interface built on top of Jenkins, offering a visual representation of the entire software delivery pipeline. It focuses on simplicity and ease of use, making it accessible to both technical and non-technical users. On the other hand, Jenkins X has a command-line interface (CLI) and a web-based dashboard, which are more developer-centric and provide a more traditional CI/CD experience.

  2. Focus and Functionality: Blue Ocean primarily focuses on visualizing and monitoring Jenkins pipelines, as well as facilitating collaboration and ease of use. It offers powerful visualization features, such as the pipeline editor, which allows users to drag and drop pipeline components. Additionally, Blue Ocean integrates with other DevOps tools, enabling users to manage their entire software delivery process from a single interface. In contrast, Jenkins X is designed specifically for cloud-native applications, leveraging Kubernetes for automatic scaling and deployment. It provides built-in support for popular cloud platforms and offers out-of-the-box capabilities for managing environments, promotion strategies, and automated rollbacks.

  3. Pipeline Configuration: Blue Ocean makes it easier to configure and manage pipelines using a graphical user interface (GUI) that allows users to visually define pipeline stages, build triggers, and integrations with other tools. This encourages greater collaboration and simplifies the pipeline configuration process, especially for non-technical team members. On the other hand, Jenkins X follows a GitOps approach, where the pipeline is defined using YAML configuration files stored in the project's source code repository. This allows developers to have full control over the pipeline configuration and versioning, enabling a more standardized and scalable approach.

  4. Built-in Features: Blue Ocean offers a wide range of built-in features, such as real-time pipeline visualization, advanced analytics, and a comprehensive plugin ecosystem. It also provides support for various plugins and extensions available in the Jenkins ecosystem. Jenkins X, on the other hand, focuses on built-in features specifically tailored for cloud-native applications, including container image management, automated release management, and preview environments for every pull request.

  5. Installation and Setup: Setting up Blue Ocean requires installing and configuring Jenkins first, as it is essentially a user interface extension for Jenkins. This means that users need to have some familiarity with Jenkins to effectively use Blue Ocean. Jenkins X, however, comes with a bundled installation, providing an out-of-the-box experience that includes Jenkins as well as additional components required for cloud-native applications, such as Helm and Kubernetes.

  6. Community and Support: Blue Ocean has a large and established user community and benefits from the extensive support and documentation available for Jenkins. It is a mature project with a strong ecosystem of plugins and extensions contributed by the Jenkins community. Jenkins X, being a more recent project, has a smaller but growing community, with a focus on cloud-native tools and practices. It benefits from the active contributions and support from the CNCF (Cloud Native Computing Foundation) community.

In summary, Blue Ocean offers a visually appealing and user-friendly experience, with powerful visualization and collaboration features, while Jenkins X is focused on cloud-native applications, providing out-of-the-box capabilities for managing modern software delivery pipelines.

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Advice on Blue Ocean, Jenkins X

Stratos
Stratos

Jan 13, 2020

Needs advice

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
181k views181k
Comments

Detailed Comparison

Blue Ocean
Blue Ocean
Jenkins X
Jenkins X

Designed from the ground up for Jenkins Pipeline and compatible with Freestyle jobs, Blue Ocean reduces clutter and increases clarity for every member of your team.

Jenkins X is a CI/CD solution for modern cloud applications on Kubernetes

Sophisticated visualizations of CD pipelines, allowing for fast and intuitive comprehension of software pipeline status.;Pipeline editor (In Development) that makes automating CD pipelines approachable by guiding the user through an intuitive and visual process to create a pipeline.;Personalization of the Jenkins UI to suit the role-based needs of each member of the DevOps team.;Pinpoint precision when intervention is needed and/or issues arise. The Blue Ocean UI shows where in the pipeline attention is needed, facilitating exception handling and increasing productivity.;Native integration for branch and pull requests enables maximum developer productivity when collaborating on code with others in GitHub and Bitbucket.
Automated CI and CD - Rather than having to have deep knowledge of the internals of Jenkins Pipeline, Jenkins X will default awesome pipelines for your projects that implements fully CI and CD; Environment Promotion via GitOps - Each team gets a set of Environments. Jenkins X then automates the management of the Environments and the Promotion of new versions of Applications between Environments via GitOps; Pull Request Preview Environments - Jenkins X automatically spins up Preview Environments for your Pull Requests so you can get fast feedback before changes are merged to master; Feedback on Issues and Pull Requests - Jenkins X automatically comments on your Commits, Issues and Pull Requests with feedback as code is ready to be previewed, is promoted to environments or if Pull Requests are generated automatically to upgrade versions
Statistics
GitHub Stars
2.9K
GitHub Stars
4.7K
GitHub Forks
537
GitHub Forks
800
Stacks
92
Stacks
147
Followers
167
Followers
370
Votes
7
Votes
16
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 7
    Beautiful interface
Pros
  • 7
    Kubernetes integration
  • 5
    Scripted Pipelines
  • 4
    GitOps
Cons
  • 1
    Complexity
Integrations
Jenkins
Jenkins
Kubernetes
Kubernetes
macOS
macOS
Linux Mint
Linux Mint
Ubuntu
Ubuntu
Debian
Debian
Fedora
Fedora

What are some alternatives to Blue Ocean, Jenkins X?

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.

Travis CI

Travis CI

Free for open source projects, our CI environment provides multiple runtimes (e.g. Node.js or PHP versions), data stores and so on. Because of this, hosting your project on travis-ci.com means you can effortlessly test your library or applications against multiple runtimes and data stores without even having all of them installed locally.

Codeship

Codeship

Codeship runs your automated tests and configured deployment when you push to your repository. It takes care of managing and scaling the infrastructure so that you are able to test and release more frequently and get faster feedback for building the product your users need.

CircleCI

CircleCI

Continuous integration and delivery platform helps software teams rapidly release code with confidence by automating the build, test, and deploy process. Offers a modern software development platform that lets teams ramp.

TeamCity

TeamCity

TeamCity is a user-friendly continuous integration (CI) server for professional developers, build engineers, and DevOps. It is trivial to setup and absolutely free for small teams and open source projects.

Drone.io

Drone.io

Drone is a hosted continuous integration service. It enables you to conveniently set up projects to automatically build, test, and deploy as you make changes to your code. Drone integrates seamlessly with Github, Bitbucket and Google Code as well as third party services such as Heroku, Dotcloud, Google AppEngine and more.

wercker

wercker

Wercker is a CI/CD developer automation platform designed for Microservices & Container Architecture.

GoCD

GoCD

GoCD is an open source continuous delivery server created by ThoughtWorks. GoCD offers business a first-class build and deployment engine for complete control and visibility.

Shippable

Shippable

Shippable is a SaaS platform that lets you easily add Continuous Integration/Deployment to your Github and BitBucket repositories. It is lightweight, super simple to setup, and runs your builds and tests faster than any other service.

Buildkite

Buildkite

CI and build automation tool that combines the power of your own build infrastructure with the convenience of a managed, centralized web UI. Used by Shopify, Basecamp, Digital Ocean, Venmo, Cochlear, Bugsnag and more.

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