Building and automating packaging of software can be a challenging task. As the complexity of the project grows so do the dependencies on third-party artifacts. Using Maven we can define and manage the project structure centrally and it helps improve overall build times.
TeamCity is well suited for an organization using continuous integration, meaning you release code to production often, and an agile project management system. There are free versions available for small teams and enterprise versions available for large teams with many different builds. TeamCity is probably overkill for basic e-commerce or blog website builds that do not require much development after the initial launch
Fully customizable build process. Each step of the build process can be parameterized and customized to address specific needs of particular applications. This allowed us to easily convert from a custom VM-based environment to our current Docker-based environment.
Manages large numbers of build agents seamlessly. This allows us to run multiple builds on many different applications in a most efficient manner.
Build steps can be managed in an arbitrary manner, allowing some parts of the process to proceed in parallel while restricting others to depend on completion of all relevant steps.
One of the issues with building software using Apache Maven is that its cache resolution is not optimal. It pulls down all the artifacts onto the developer's local machine and can sometimes result in conflicts.
The build process can vary in time and gets progressively longer as the project's complexity increases.
The overall usability of Apache Maven is very good to us. We were able to incorporate it into our company's build process pretty quickly. We deployed it to multiple teams throughout the entire enterprise. We got good feedback from our developers stating that Apache Maven has simplified their build process. It also allowed to to standardize the build process for the entire enterprise, thus ensure that each development team is using the same, consistent process to build code.
TeamCity runs really well, even when sharing a small instance with other applications. The user interface adequately conveys important information without being overly bloated, and it is snappy. There isn't any significant overhead to build agents or unit test runners that we have measured.
I can't speak to the support, as I've never had issues. Apache Maven "just works," and errors were user errors or local nexus errors. Apache Maven is a great build/dependency management tool. I give it a 9/10 because occasionally the error message don't immediately indicate a solution...but again, those errors were always user or configuration errors, and the Maven documentation is extensive, so I don't find fault in Maven, but in its users.
Ant is useful if your build is heavily based on customs scripts running in the right order. Maven greatly simplifies the process to keep track of and download build dependencies compared with Apache Ant. If your build is based on multiple custom scripts running in a specific order there is a lot of overhead in Maven compared to Apache Ant.
Jenkins relies on being open source as the primary driver for its success. This low cost is a huge factor for many companies, both small and large. The professional, free tier of TeamCity offers a huge amount of growth before ever needing to pay anything. I personally also find the user experience of TeamCity to be much better, both from a look and feel, as well as from an out-of-the-box feature set perspective. The big selling feature of ADO is its native integration with Azure. TeamCity integrates very well with out-of-the-box .NET support and greatly simplifies our use of another diverse tooling outside of the Microsoft ecosystem.
TeamCity was a key contributor to our organization's adoption of Agile.
TeamCity made it possible to KILL "It works on my laptop" conversations with Developers. If it does not compile in TeamCity - the project is not deployable. TeamCity's easy to use interface made it possible to quickly adopt a "Deploy Only from TeamCity" policy, further ensuring TeamCity Builds were the gold-standard for well-configured source code.
