Knapsack Pro
Knapsack Pro
AWS CodeBuildhttps://aws.amazon.com/codebuild/ |
Dronehttps://drone.io |
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|---|---|---|
| Unique feature |
AWS integration
|
Customization
|
| Type of product |
SaaS
|
SaaS / On Premise
|
| Offers a free plan |
Yes The AWS free-tier includes 100 build-minutes per month, on their smallest machine. It's unclear, but it seems like this applies only to the first year of service. |
Yes The cloud version is free for open source projects. Also offers a free plan for any project, with a limit of 5000 builds per year. The on-premise version is available as a Docker image. |
| Predictable pricing |
Yes (partial) While it's clear what the cost is (priced per build-minute), figuring out costs can be a hassle, especially as the price can vary quite a bit depending on commits to the project. |
Yes Predictable pricing based on number of users and repositories. They have a calculator to help determine cost. |
| Support / SLA |
Yes
|
N/A It's not clear what their support commitment is. They have a fairly active community on Discourse, for community support. |
|
Paralellism
Every CI servers tends to address this differently (parallel, distributed, build matrix). Some of it is just marketing, and some is just nuance. For this table, parallel means that tasks can be run concurrently on the same machine, distributed means that tasks can be scaled horizontally, on multiple machines How to split tests in parallel in the optimal way with Knapsack Pro |
N/A
|
Yes Pipeline task configuration allows running tasks in parallel |
|
Distributed builds
distributed means that tasks can be scaled horizontally, on multiple machines How to split tests in parallel in the optimal way with Knapsack Pro |
N/A
|
Yes Pipelines can be configured to run on multiple machines, although they recommend that to be an option only if paralellizing tasks and scaling vertically doesn't suffice. They even support multi-platform distribution (ie: running tasks on various operating systems) |
| Containers support / Build environment |
Yes Builds run in specific-to-the-project, isolated environments |
Yes By default, they offer Docker support for the CI/CD job runners. |
|
Analytics / Status overview
Analytics and overview referrs to the ability to, at a glance, see what's breaking (be it a certain task, or the build for a specific project) |
Yes Offers minimal information built in, but allows integrations with tools such as CloudWatch (another Amazon product), or streaming build information to your own API, for more in-depth analysis. |
Yes
|
|
Management support
How easy is it to manage users / projects / assign roles and permissions and so on |
Yes Professional user management via AWS Identity and Access Management: https://aws.amazon.com/iam/ |
Yes They offer in-depth documentation for user and server management. A lot of it can be done via the drone CLI tool, which seems to be the focal point of the docs. |
| Self-hosted option |
No
|
Yes
|
| Hosted plans / SaaS |
Yes
|
Yes
|
|
Build pipelines
A continuous delivery pipeline is a description of the process that the software goes through from a new code commit, through testing and other statical analysis steps all the way to the end-users of the product. |
Yes As it's usually the case with Amazon, CodeBuild simply provides the 'build' part of a true CI/CD system, while pipelines are managed via CodePipeline, another Amazon product: https://aws.amazon.com/codepipeline/pricing/?nc=sn&loc=3 |
Yes Easily configurable pipelines via YML files. |
|
Reports
Reports are about the abilty to see specific reports (like code coverage or custom ones), but not necesarily tied in into a larger dashboard. |
Yes Offers minimal information built in, but allows integrations with tools such as CloudWatch (another Amazon product), or streaming build information to your own API, for more in-depth analysis. |
N/A
|
|
Ecosystem
Besides the official documentation and software, is there a large community using this product? Are there any community-driven tools / plugins that you can use? |
N/A
|
Yes Drone CI allows integrating plugins into the CI/CD process. They have a list of available community plugins and provide documentation on building your own. Plugins are Docker containers which plug directly into the CI/CD process. |
|
Specific language support: Ruby
Some CI servers have built-in support for parsing RSpec or Istanbul output for example and we mention those. Some others make it even easier by detecting Gemfiles or package.json and automate parts of the process for the developer. |
No (partial) The environments available on CodeBuilt include Ruby pre-installed: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/codebuild/latest/userguide/build-env-ref-available.html, but that seems to be as far as specific support goes |
No (partial) No specific support, but they do provide sufficient documentation on getting a Ruby project up and running, including a multi-platform example. |
| Specific language support: JavaScript |
No (partial) The environments available on CodeBuilt include Node pre-installed: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/codebuild/latest/userguide/build-env-ref-available.html, but that seems to be as far as specific support goes |
No (partial) No specific 1st party support, but the plugin marketplace features an NPM authoring and an NPM authentication plugin. |
|
Integrations
1st party support for common tools (like Slack notifications, various VCS platforms, etc) |
Yes CodeBuild builds can be connected to sources such as GitHub or BitBucket, but being an Amazon Service, the deepest integrations are with other Amazon Code services (CodePipeline, CodeDeploy, and others: https://aws.amazon.com/products/developer-tools/) |
Yes Integrates well with source code management platforms (1st party support for GitHub, GitLab, BitBucket) as well as other systems via 3rd party plugins. |
|
API
Custom integreation is available, via an API or otherwise, it's mentioned separately as it allows further customization than any of the Ecosystem/Integration options |
Yes Amazon SDKs can be used to interact with CodeBuild |
Yes Drone provides a feature-rich REST API, as well as an official Go SDK for it. |
| Auditing |
Yes
|
Yes
|
| Additional notes |
Like most things Amazon, it becomes more valuable as you acquire and integrate various Amazon solutions, not necesarily as a standalone tool. |
The fact that Drone works with any source code manager, as well as the fact that it can run tasks on multiple platforms makes it stand out from the rest. Very nifty! |