Knapsack Pro

Rancher Pipelines vs Google Cloud Build comparison of Continuous Integration servers
What are the differences between Rancher Pipelines and Google Cloud Build?

Rancher Pipelines

https://rancher.com/docs/rancher/v2.x/en/project-admin/tools/pipelines/

Google Cloud Build

https://cloud.google.com/cloud-build/
Unique feature

DevOps tool for container orchestration

Security / speed

Type of product

On Premise

SaaS

Offers a free plan

Yes

Free, open source project

Yes

Google offers a generous 120 build-minutes per day plan, not including time spent waiting in the queue.

Predictable pricing

Yes

It's free!

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.

Support / SLA

Yes

Paid support available: https://rancher.com/pricing/

Yes

Even available as a paid add-on, for 24/7 phone support for example: https://cloud.google.com/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

Yes

You can run multiple parallel steps within a build stage

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

Unclear from the documentation (probably not)

N/A

Containers support / Build environment

Yes

Yes

Native Docker and Packer support

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

Not particularly clear, but it appears you can monitor stats in a Grafana dashboard: https://rancher.com/docs/rancher/v2.x/en/project-admin/tools/monitoring/

Yes

Management support
How easy is it to manage users / projects / assign roles and permissions and so on

Yes

User management is available, with specific roles assigned, or permissions to certain resources and projects

Yes

Self-hosted option

Yes

No (partial)

While there's no self hosted variant, they provide a local Cloud Build image which allows you to build locally, very valuable for debugging.

Hosted plans / SaaS

No

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

Pipelines as code (YML files), but also manageable via the UI

Yes

Configurable via YML and/or JSON 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

Yes

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

There are predefined images built for Cloud Build, which can be integrated right away in your build process. Some of them are first party: https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/cloud-builders and others are community contributed: https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/cloud-builders-community

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.

N/A

Pipelines / CI is just a small part of Rancher. No specific support mentioned.

N/A

Nothing specific as far as we can tell

Specific language support: JavaScript

N/A

Pipelines / CI is just a small part of Rancher. No specific support mentioned.

Yes (partial)

npm, yarn and jasmine-node support via predefined Cloud Build steps.

Integrations
1st party support for common tools (like Slack notifications, various VCS platforms, etc)

Yes

Integrations available for GitLab, GitHub and Bitbucket

Yes

Various integrations available via custom Build Steps, as well as natively (Kubernetes, Docker, etc.)

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

REST API available. It provides introspection and documentation: https://github.com/rancher/api-spec/blob/master/specification.md#filtering. It should offer enough access to allow building whatever customizations or integrations with 3rd party tools deemed necessary.

Yes

REST API and comprehensive CLI tool, as well as a pub/sub system for build notifications.

Auditing

Yes

Allows logging to various systems (Kafka, Elastic, etc) which should make audit possible

Yes

Additional notes

Rancher is a full software stack for container orchestration, going as far as building their own Linux distribution (RancherOS). Using Rancher seems more like a decision to be made considering all other features Rancher offers, not just the CI server. Also worth noting that Rancher uses Jenkins under the hood, but the engine is locked so projects can't just be migrated between the two.

Not unlike other Google tools, there's a strong emphasis on allowing developers to build on top of the service. Becomes more valuable if you're using other Google Cloud services as well.

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