I am looking for a comparison between IBM Build Forge (Rational) and Hudson CI.
At work we have full licenses for BuildForge but recently we started using Hudson for doing continuous integration and automating other tasks.
I used BuildForge very little and I would like to see if there are any special advantages of BuildForge over Hudson.
Also it would be very helpful to see a list of specific advantages of Hudson over BuildForge.
I not sure if it important or not, but I found interesting that Build Forge is not listed under continuous integration tools at wikipedia.
Thanks for bringing attention to the fact it was not on the wikipedia list of continuous integration applications. I have now added it. Build Forge has been a leader in providing continuous integration capabilities by use of it's SCM adapters for many, many years. Build Forge has a strength in supporting many platforms through its use of agents. These agents can run on Windows, Linux, AIX, Solaris, System Z, and many more -- they even give you the source code for the agents for free so you can compile it on just about any platform. The interface allows you to easily automate tasks that run sequentially or in parallel on one or multiple boxes. Selectors allow you to select a specific build server by host name or by criteria such as "any windows machine with 2gb of ram" from a pool of available agents. The entire process is fully auditable, utilizes role based permissions, and is stored in a central enterprise database such as DB2, Oracle, SQL Server, and others.
One of the most compelling reasons to use Build Forge is it's Rational Automation Framework for WebSphere. It allows a full integration into WebSphere environments to automate deployments and configurations of WebSphere through out of the box libraries. The full installation, patching, deployment of apps, and configuration of WAS and Portal can be performed using these libraries. To find out more, it is best to contact your IBM Rational representative.
You can use RAFW (IBM Rational Automation Framework for WebSphere) with BuildForge. It does not make sense to use RAFW with other ci servers, since RAFW requires BuildForge.
You have support for BuildForge and it integrates with other IBM software like ClearCase. Theoretically you have only to deal with one vendor if something in the chain does not work, but IBM has different support teams for their products and you might become their ping pong ball. :(
Hudson is open source (if you like that), that means you can get the source and modify it to serve you better. But the release cycle is very short (about 1 week, agile development). There is a more stable version with support available now (for cash of course) from the company of the main author of Hudson.
Hudson is currently main stream and is actively developed. I don't know how the usability of BuildForge is, but Hudson is good (not always perfect). The plugin concept of Hudson is a great plus, not sure if BuildForge has it as well.
Currently, we are using Hudson, but BuildForge was not looked at in detail.
You need to define what you would need continuous integration for (e.g. building, testing). Having used Hudson, I can vouch for its usefulness and effectiveness. There are many plugins that extend Hudson that can suit various needs. And you can't beat the price point (free).
You need to inquire as to why a BuildForge license was obtained at your place of employment. Perhaps someone on your team knows why this was done. If it isn't necessary for your needs, don't renew your BuildForge license and simply continue using Hudson.
Being a BuildForge/RAFW user, I have to object to one point stated above. It is perfectly possible to use RAFW without BuildForge. It is driven by a command line script, and you could use for example Hudson and RAFW together just fine.
A sample command would look like:
rafw.sh -e env -c cell -t was_common_configure_start_dmgr
The primary differentiators IMO:
Hudson/Jenkins is more readily extensible with the many existing plugins. It has a large active community and plenty information and documentation.
BuildForge can be configured with agents running on multiple machines and tasks can be assigned to run on a target agent. Reliable vendor support.
Related
We are planning to implement jenkins for the whole organization. We want to go with single jenkins instance that will be used by many teams with Slave architecture. I want to know if there are any best practices for Plugin management. Since teams would request for installing different plugin, how can i manage these plugsin installation.
Thanks in advance for all your help
I would install Docker on all agent machines and instruct teams to make use of Docker containers in their Pipelines as much as possible. Thereby you forego the need of installing different programming languages and plugins on all your agents.
For plugins that really have to be added to Jenkins, I'd set up a test instance of your Jenkins server, to try out the plugin, and see whether it clashes with existing plugins. Try to keep the number of plugins low, suggest people to only use quality plugins that get recent upgrades, and remove plugins when you no longer need them.
One issue you will encounter is Jenkins has no (as far as I can find) authorization strategy for plugins. Basically, all plugins are available to everyone. Thia may be an issue if teams have different and contraindicated requirements (eg: a team not allowed to use ssh or HTTP requests). If you have a homogeneous approach to SW development, code, infra, tools, etc, then it becomes a matter of scale only..
In a large org, you also may have issues with a single Jenkins merely finding maintenance windows. It also creates a single point of failure.Are you OK w/that or need H/A?
You may benfit from several masters (per business unit or product) and use JCasC to manage common configurations overview, plugin to make your life easier.
I could not find the difference between these two. Are these same or different.
The first difference is support (as others have mentioned). CloudBees offers enterprise grade support as well as a fully vetted and tested version of Jenkins that will be more stable under various plugins and deployments. You can actually purchase "Support Only" from CloudBees if you are satisfied with your OSS Jenkins deployment and simply want support during upgrades, patching, break/fix, etc.
From a feature perspective, CloudBees brings a lot from an enterprise manageability, scalability, and security standpoint.
Manageability: CloudBees comes with CJOC (CloudBees Jenkins Operations Center) built into the software. This is a single pane of glass management console that allows organizations or large teams to centrally manage the jenkins environment. Things like folders, RBAC, pipeline and master templates, and the ability to rapidly spin up/tear down a containerized jenkins master are all managed from this single console.
Scaleability: CloudBees leverages Kubernetes to provide organizations with the ability to elastically scale Jenkins environments as needed. With CloudBees, your oganization can move away from a single "Monolithic"/"Frankenstein" master and into a multi-master and distributed pipeline architecture. This greatly reduces upgrade and administration complexity. This also eliminates the risk from a single point of failure that a monolithic architecture exposes.
Security: CloudBees allows organizations to install Roll Based Access Control within Jenkins. This keeps users from accidentally or intentionally accessing repos that they shouldn't be allowed to interact with. CloudBees also provides "folders" to segregate specific job executions onto specific agents. Lastly CloudBees allows organizations to create pipeline templates and associated plugins for each team. These templates can be as rigid or loose as desired per the organizations security policies.
CloudBees is regularly adding enhancements to further differentiate themselves from Jenkins Open Source and make themselves more appealing to large enterprise requirements.
On top of the above, CloudBees has developed a presentation layer that rides on top of Jenkins for SDLC pipeline, CD monitoring, and metric tracking called DevOptics.
Jenkins is open source while CloudBees Jenkins Enterprise is a commercial extension of open source Jenkins. Go here for an up to date comparison table.
After evaluating existent tools like Ansible Tower, rundeck and others, it seems that no tool can fulfill the needed requirements.
We have complex data-center servers, cluster of DB and web servers, the data-center has a lot of client-systems, +100, and other tools like solr, redis, kafka... deployed there across the physical servers, not to mention that the same data-center servers have different accounts, linux users, (QA,stag,production..etc), for now the meta-data about these environments alongside their web-apps, source code to be used, servers of the cluster are all defined on xml and there is a bash scriptsreads from that XML that operated manually to run any operation/task (like checkout the source, build, deploy, start, stop... and other customized operations)
This system should be done with a developer and DevOps engineers together, but what I want to know, is there any preferable framework(s) that could be used for this system? does the workflows frameworks are usable on this case? e.g, Activiti BPMN? the Ant is an option but we don't need just an automation tool more that scheduler and logging and a lot of other services.
And if this is not the right place, can you please point out where cat I ask such question?
What's required is to create a web-based system as automation tool with:
UI to define the specific operations to be done, like build, deploy across the cluster specific web-app on specific env, start/stop specific web-app on specific machine, or any other customized operation, with multiple selections and flexible and dynamic options choosing way.
The FE should show the executing workflows and operations within them.
Dynamic way to create set of operations as a single workflow, that have dynamic ability to set the dependencies among them.
An interface between the back-end code of this system with the already existent bash scripts that will do the actual tasks across the DC servers.
A scheduler to be able to organize these operations in respect to a defined complicated dependencies between the workflows.
Authentication & authorization services to the users since there will be a lot of customized roles upon the operations,environments, the products...etc
Logging system to save the operations outputs.
Why not use a combination of ansible/Docker and jenkins, Jenkins can do most of the stuff you described using Pipeline projects/MultiProjects and Ansible for your UI and role related details
The task you're describing is basic network orchestration, and there're a bunch of orchestration engines/software out there. However, the fact that you are asking this question means you're just starting out and not ready to invest in a full fledged management product yet.
I strongly suggest that you take a look at Chef for your purposes.
Hope this helps.
I would recommend you to take a look at jenkinsx.io if you are targeting kubernetes and containers (docker). As part of the activiti bpm team we are trying to align with such technologies to make people life easy to integrate more complex workflows with DevOps and operations of your projects.
In a Devops context, Who is the responsible for the automation tasks ?
more exactly in the case of "pipeline as a code" in jenkins . who is supposed to do this task ? the devoloper or the operator ?
who is the actor ?
"The key to DevOps is greater collaboration between engineering and operations."
Roles : DEVOPS
Responsibilities :
1. Management : The DevOps Engineer ensures compliance to standards by monitoring the enterprise software and online websites. The engineer also regulates tools and processes in the engineering department and catalyses their simultaneous enhancement and evolution.
2 Design and Development : Design and Development of enterprise infrastructure and its architecture is one of the major responsibilities that DevOps Engineers are tasked with. Such Engineers are highly skilled coders which enable them to script tools aimed at enhancing developer productivity.
3 Collaboration and Support : The DevOps’ Modus Operandi is to collaborate extensively and yield results in all aspects of their work. Everything ranging from technical analyses to deployment and monitoring is handled, with the focus to enhance overall system reliability and scalability. The diagram below gives one a clear picture of the values that define DevOps.
4 Knowledge : DevOps staff and Engineers aid in promotion of knowledge sharing and overall DevOps culture throughout the engineering department
5 Versatile Duties : DevOps staff and Engineers also take on work delegated by IT director, CTO, DevOps head and more. They will also perform similar duties to the designations mentioned above.
Standard Definition :
DevOps is an IT mindset that encourages communication, collaboration, integration and automation among software developers and IT operations in order to improve the speed and quality of delivering software.
Layman's Definition :
Any kind of automation that enables the opportunity for smoother Development, Operations, Support and delivery of the product is DevOps.
Indrustry's View :
There usually are two prominent area's where DevOps mindset is applied across industry :
a) Primary functionaries of DevOps like
• Continuous Integration,
• Continuous Delivery,
• Continuous Deployment,
• Infrastructure as an code or infrastructure Automation,
• CI/CD Pipeline Orchestration,
• Configuration Management and
• Cloud Management (AWS, Azure or GCP)
b) Secondary functionaries of DevOps like
• SCM tool Support,
• Code Quality tech support like Sonar, Veracode, Nexus etc.
• Middleware tech support for tools like NPM, Kafka, Redis, NGIMX, API Gateway, etc
• Infrastructure tech support for components like F5, DNS, Web Servers, Build Server Management etc
• OS Level support for miscellaneous activities lke Server Patching, Scripting for automation of server level tasks etc.
There is no exact answer to this. It depends on many factors.
The development team will most likely want more ownership over the pipeline, and therefore would want to own the templates / code required to achieve the end goal of automation.
The opposite side of this is also completely valid. An operations team could be the custodians of a pipeline and mandate a development team must meet certain standards and use their automation pipelines to be able to get into an environment or onto a platform.
If an environment is an island, and development teams are trying to get to that island. Each development team can build their own bridge to get there. Or the operations team can build a bridge and ask the development teams to use it. Both are valid and the end result is the same either way.
If the end result is the same, then the only thing that matters is how you apply it in the context of the organization, team(s) and the people you are working with to achieve that common goal.
The assigned developer (and scrum team) should be responsible for the complete delivery of all aspects of development through final deployment into production. This fosters the notions of ownership and empowerment, and focuses responsibility for the full life cycle delivery of the service (application).
DevOps engineering should be responsible for providing an optimal tool chain and environments for rapid and quality delivery. I see DevOps role as the development focused precedent to SRE. If SRE's maintain high performance, stable production environments, then DevOps team maintains optimal development and testing environments. In theory, DevOps should extend into the realm of SRE, conforming into a single team supporting the environments for rapid innovation with quality to meet the business needs.
Everything from committing of the code to production. This includes
Automation
Production Support
Writing automation scripts
Debugging Production Infrastructure
In short Devops = Infrastructure + Automation + Support
We are looking to incorporate continuous integration/nightly builds into the development process of two of our products. One is to be written in Java using JavaFX for interface, the other is to be written in ASP .Net MVC using C# as our coding language.
The question is pretty straightforward: considering the fact that we have those two products and we want to use the same CI server for both of them, which one would be the best pick? Are there any known issues regarding either language that we should be aware of? Considering we're a very small team, is either one considerably easier to maintain and configure than the other? Any insight will be helpful!
Please read this : How to choose between Hudson and Jenkins?
Generally use Jenkins, it is Hudson fork with better support and have much more plugins.
Hudson died the day the entire developer community followed Kohsuke over to Jenkins.
Jenkins power is in its plugins of which Jenkins has over 1000. Hudson has virtually no more than the day the community stopped developing Hudson and started moving Jenkins forward.
Jenkins has a rich developer community, Hudson (owned / killed by Oracle) has one guy: no contest!