CI / CD solutions

Everyone wants free candy. Or a CI/CD solution, that …

• auto-deploys container-based servcies
• auto-updates (roll-forward, roll-back) those services on keypress and “triggers”
• has one-click-deployment of services.

My definition of “service” here is “A set of containers working together in a certain way, automatically load balanced where needed”. Example: A n worker nodes, loadbalanced from a web endpoint, and a database container. All deployed at the same time. Including one-click-deployment of environments (“Oh, I’d like to test this revision again, let’s deploy it quickly”…). Note that this is mostly CD (continuous deployment), cause CI is being done for a while now with - mostly - Jenins and other tools.

What I have found so far that seems to satisfy those requirements:

• Rancher (note: RancherOS is not the same, although from the same people)
• OpenShift
• (maybe) Mesosphere
• Kubernetes (it seems, updated 2015-12-10)
• Vamp (it seems, updated 2015-12-10)

And the service-only solutions without a tools tack which you can deploy locally:

• CoreOS’ Tectonic
• Shippable
• Amazon ECS

This is kinda it. I would love to evaluate  all those tools, but most of are not really AWS-deploy-friendly, and in the Shippable and Tectonic case they are paid full stack services without local (cloud-owned) deployment anyway. And most are in beta. But the scenery is becoming interesting …

I will try to post my findings here, as well as the final choice I made for my current client, along with the reasons.

And for now: Mesosphere and Rancher looks really cool. And I mean “looks” - the UI is just pleasing (which is the most important selection criteria, I know 😉

Update 2015-12-10: Added Vamp, Kubernetes