Knapsack Pro
Knapsack Pro
Solano CIhttps://xebialabs.com/technology/solano-ci/ |
Jenkinshttps://jenkins.io |
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| Unique feature |
N/A
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Plugins
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| Type of product |
N/A
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Self-hosted / On Premise
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| Offers a free plan |
No Their website only mentions a free trial |
Yes Free, open source software |
| Predictable pricing |
No Very hard to get any information on pricing. It seems like they target enterprise clients only. |
Yes Jenkins is free software, the only costs are those assigned to running your infrastructure. |
| Support / SLA |
N/A
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No (partial) No official support available, or SLAs. However, Jenkins' popularity ensures you'll find support in various places (official Jenkins forum, IRC, StackOverflow etc.) |
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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 They mention that by paralellizing tests they get a huge performance boost (10x to 80x) but details are severly lacking. |
Yes (partial) Jenkins allows builds to be run in parallel, but all builds share the same environment and there can be issues arising from shared resources such as the filesystem. |
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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
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Yes (partial) Jenkins has a concept of master server and agents, for distributing builds, but setting that up requires quite a bit of manual work from a sysadmin, compared to other options. |
| Containers support / Build environment |
Yes
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No (partial) By default, Jenkins runs all builds in the same environment as the build server itself, which can lead to numerous issues and is generally not a good practice. Some plugins address this issue, but they need to be manually installed. |
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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 The wording they use implies that this is possible. |
Yes Available via the Blue Ocean project (part of Jenkins): https://jenkins.io/doc/book/blueocean/dashboard/#dashboard |
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Management support
How easy is it to manage users / projects / assign roles and permissions and so on |
N/A
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No In practice, for Jenkins it usually means that there's someone solely in charge of the Jenkins instance (configuration, management). Collaboration features built into other similar products are lacking, as are governance features (no easy way to tell from Jenkins alone _who_ is responsabile for a broken build, for example), even if your Version Control Server of choice can give that information (via `git blame` for example). |
| Self-hosted option |
N/A
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Yes Jenkins is Open Source Software, and self-hosting is the only way to use it. |
| Hosted plans / SaaS |
N/A
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No Only available for self-hosting. |
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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 The wording they use suggests that this is possible. |
Yes Offers extensive support for custom pipelines, either through the Jenkins Pipeline DSL, written in a Jenkinsfile, either through the Web UI. Also, their Blue Ocean project is a great tool for building pipelines: https://jenkins.io/projects/blueocean/ |
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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. |
N/A
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Yes Has ready-made integrations for standard reports such as JUnit test results. |
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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 Probably not, considering how non-transparent this product is. |
> 1000 community plugins Thanks to it's popularity, there's a large selection of available plugins for Jenkins. They can all be easily browsed over at https://plugins.jenkins.io/. The downside is that almost anything you want to do in Jenkins requires installing a plugin, even core functionality such as parsing output or checking out source code. |
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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
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Yes (Partial) RSpec and Cucumber test suites can be integrated into Jenkins thanks to the large pool of available plugins and Ruby gems. Jenkins only understands the JUnit format natively. |
| Specific language support: JavaScript |
N/A
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Yes (Partial) Jest, AVA and other test suites can be integrated into Jenkins thanks to the large pool of available plugins and NPM packages. Jenkins only understands the JUnit format natively. |
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Integrations
1st party support for common tools (like Slack notifications, various VCS platforms, etc) |
N/A
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Yes Allows integrations with other tools (ie: Slack, GitHub) or communication protocols (ie: email) via it's rich plugin suite |
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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 |
N/A
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Yes For use-cases that the +1k plugins don't cover, the Jenkins Remote API is yet another way to integrate Jenkins into your favorite tools or internal products. |
| Auditing |
N/A
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No Jenkins instances are really managed by a sole user with administrative privileges. This can lead to various issues when it comes to audit trails / accountability. |
| Additional notes |
It seems like Solano CI has been retired, and the new solution is the XebiaLabs DevOps Platform, but which integrates Jenkins and Travis, among others: https://xebialabs.com/products/devops-platform-overview/ |
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