Australian company Atlassian offers Bamboo, a continuous integration server.
$1,200
HashiCorp Packer
Score 10.0 out of 10
N/A
HashiCorp Packer automates the creation of machine images, coming out of the box with support to build images for Amazon EC2, CloudStack, DigitalOcean, Docker, Google Compute Engine, Microsoft Azure, QEMU, VirtualBox, and VMware.
Large companies will find it particularly useful, but smaller companies and independent developers will not be able to afford the cost, and will not see many advantages compared to using an open source solution. However, having some software to handle continuous integration build servers as well as deployments, and doing this consistently between products, is absolutely essential.
We use packer to generate new machine images for multiple platforms on every change to our Configuration Management tools like Chef/Puppet/Ansible It's act single tool for Image building for Multi-provider like AWS/Azure/GCP Helps to achieve Dev/Prod Parity Packer itself doesn't have a state like Terraform. You can't do packer output AMI ID. If you have a scenario where you want to maintain the state for images it would be tough to manage via Packer.
Continuous Deployment - you can use Bamboo to automatically build and deploy whenever there are changes in the source code.
Continuous Integration - by integrating the automated tests and the integration tests before deploying you make sure you know immediately if the latest code fits into the whole scheme of apps.
Integration with Jira and Bitbucket.
Flexibility with the program language used for builds: Maven, Ant, PowerShell, any command line tools.
Bamboo offers solid usability for teams looking for an integrated, scalable CI/CD solution, especially those using Atlassian tools. Its interface is intuitive for existing Atlassian users, and its focus on deployment automation makes it a strong option for continuous delivery. However, its complexity and cost may pose challenges for small teams or those new to CI/CD. Overall, Bamboo’s usability shines in environments where ease of integration and streamlined workflows are prioritized. Still, it may require more effort for teams unfamiliar with its setup or without dedicated resources.
Support for Bamboo has started lack a little over the years. Atlassian has been moving more towards Bitbucket Pipelines and away from the on-premise install of Bamboo. While the tool is still great, it may take a little bit of time to get a question answered by official support.
We chose Bamboo over Jenkins for 2 reasons - one, for its tight integration amongst all the products in the tool suite. We find explicit value in the traceability from JIRA issues all the way down to the Bamboo build that was triggered by the check in of those issues. The second reason was for support - we didn't want the burden of figuring out how to support Jenkins in our production environment, as can be the case with so many open source products.
There are lot of tools in market which does the job for Image creation but all of them are not complete Machine/Image as a code. All other alternatives can create Image partially. Main reason for selecting Packer are Packer is lightweight, portable, and command-line driven Packer helps keep development, staging, and production as similar as possible. Packer automates the creation of any type of machine image Multi-provider portability is the feature to die for
