Knapsack Pro
Knapsack Pro
AWS CodeBuildhttps://aws.amazon.com/codebuild/ |
TeamCityhttps://www.jetbrains.com/teamcity/ |
|
|---|---|---|
| Unique feature |
AWS integration |
Technology awareness |
| Type of product |
SaaS |
On Premise |
| Offers a free plan |
YesThe 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. |
YesThey offer a great free professional plan, limited to 100 build configurations and 3 build agents. From there, you pay for each aditional agent you want (discounts if you purchase more than 1 agent at a time). They also provide a free plan for open source, non commercial projects, and steep 50% discounts for startups. |
| 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. |
YesThey have a clear list of prices per number of agents. |
| Support / SLA |
Yes |
Yes |
|
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 |
|
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 |
N/ANo specific mention that we could find, but judging by the wording used it would appear that tasks can be divided accross different machines. |
| Containers support / Build environment |
YesBuilds run in specific-to-the-project, isolated environments |
YesFirst class Docker support, among others |
|
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) |
YesOffers 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. |
YesGreat system overview, even allows building your own dashboards in order to see everything you're interested in at a glance. |
|
Management support
How easy is it to manage users / projects / assign roles and permissions and so on |
YesProfessional user management via AWS Identity and Access Management: https://aws.amazon.com/iam/ |
YesAllows assigning roles, LDAP and Windows domain integrations and more. |
| Self-hosted option |
No |
Yes |
| Hosted plans / SaaS |
Yes |
No |
|
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. |
YesAs 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 |
YesUnlike most options in the CI/CD space, TeamCity allows defining pipelines using a Kotlin-based DSL. This unlocks a lot of potential, such as templates for common CI/CD tasks, and deep integration with various IDEs (not just JetBrains IDEs) |
|
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. |
YesOffers 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. |
YesSomething that stands out from the rest, allows integrating third party reports, as long as they produce HTML output. |
|
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 |
YesJetBrains has a rich ecosystem of plugins in general. |
|
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 |
YesUsing what they call 'Technology Awareness', promises great intehration with Ruby projects, with features such as testing framework support, static analysis and code coverage available out of the box, with no additional work required: https://www.jetbrains.com/teamcity/features/technology_awareness.html |
| 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)Unlike Ruby, there's no first class support for Javascript, although they do advertise the fact that their large collections of plugins can cover any use case for Javascript projects: https://plugins.jetbrains.com/teamcity |
|
Integrations
1st party support for common tools (like Slack notifications, various VCS platforms, etc) |
YesCodeBuild 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/) |
YesGreat cloud integrations (Google Cloud, AWS, VMWare, etc) as well as 'key' integrations (VSCode, Jira, even NuGet) |
|
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 |
YesAmazon SDKs can be used to interact with CodeBuild |
YesUnlike most tools, which offer just a Rest API, TeamCity provides ample opportunity for extension via plugins, their own API, and service messages (formatted messages on stdout) |
| 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. |
Great ecosystem, with a strong focus on integration with other tools (not only JetBrains). |
you have to wait 20 minutes for slow tests running too long on the red node
CI build completes work in only 10 minutes because Knapsack Pro ensures all parallel nodes finish work at a similar time
You can even run 20 parallel nodes to complete your CI build in 2 minutes
Step 1
Install Knapsack Pro client in your project
Step 2
Update your CI server config file to run tests in parallel with Knapsack Pro
Step 3
Run a CI build with parallel tests using Knapsack Pro
Knapsack Pro in Queue Mode splits tests in a dynamic way across parallel CI nodes to ensure each CI node finishes work at a similar time. Thanks to that, your CI build time is as fast as possible. It works with many supported CI servers.
| Programming Language | Supported test runners | Installation guide | Knapsack Pro Library README / Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ruby | RSpec, Cucumber, Minitest, test-unit, Spinach, Turnip | Install | knapsack_pro gem |
| JavaScript | Cypress.io | Install | @knapsack-pro/cypress |
| JavaScript | Jest | Install | @knapsack-pro/jest |
| JavaScript / TypeScript | Any test runner in JavaScript | How to build native integration with Knapsack Pro API to run tests in parallel for any test runner | @knapsack-pro/core |
| Any programming language | Any test runner | How to build a custom Knapsack Pro API client from scratch in any programming language | - |
Do you use other programming language or test runner? Let us know.
Run tests in parallel on AWS CodeBuild and TeamCity in the optimal way and avoid bottleneck parallel jobs.
Get started free
Monthly you can save hours
and up to $
on faster development cycle.
Dynamic tests allocation across AWS CodeBuild and TeamCity parallel jobs. Autobalance tests to get the optimal test suite split betweeen CI nodes.
Network issues? Not a problem, run tests anyway! Auto switch to the fallback mode to not depend on Knapsack Pro API.
Ruby: RSpec, Minitest, Test::Unit, Cucumber, Spinach, Turnip.
JavaScript: Cypress.io, Jest
API: Use native integration with Knapsack Pro API to run tests in parallel for any test runner
Other languages: How to build a custom Knapsack Pro API client from scratch in any programming language
Do you use different programming language or test runner? Let us know in the poll
Join the teams optimizing their tests with Knapsack Pro.
We've been really enjoying Knapsack Pro, it's been saving us a ton of time.
My team at @GustoHQ recently added @KnapsackPro to our CI. It's pretty sweet... It makes your builds faster _and_ (this is almost the better bit) more consistent! Thank you for the awesome tool!
— Stephan Hagemann (@shageman) September 26, 2022
This is a fantastic product, it's been a total game-changer for us.
We are using CircleCI and we noticed that builds were being limited by the slowest parallelized container. Knapsack Pro was really easy to setup and we saw huge improvements right away. Thank you for making this tool!
🛠How to run 7 hours of tests in 4 minutes using 100 parallel Buildkite agents and @KnapsackPro’s queue mode: https://t.co/zbXMIyNN8z
— Buildkite (@buildkite) March 29, 2017
Knapsack Pro has helped us build an insanely fast and scalable build pipeline with almost no setup or maintenance.
Knapsack Pro saves us hours of engineer waiting time every week, and is the best solution for keeping our tests load balanced that we've used to date.
I've been playing with Queue Mode. Love it! Wow, I love how fast it goes.
Awesome to see @NASA speeds up tests with #knapsack gem in https://t.co/GFOVW22dJn project! https://t.co/2GGbvnbQ7a #ruby #parallelisation
— KnapsackPro (@KnapsackPro) April 6, 2017
I just logged into my account expecting it to say that I needed to add a credit card and was so surprised and delighted to see the trial doesn't count usage by calendar days but by testing days! This is incredible! I love it!!!
I just wanted to say that I really appreciate that small but very huge feature. Thank you for being so thoughtful :)