AWS CodeBuild is a fully managed continuous integration service that compiles source code, runs tests, and produces software packages that are ready to deploy.
$0.01
Per Minute
CircleCI
Score 9.5 out of 10
N/A
CircleCI is a software delivery engine from the company of the same name in San Francisco, that helps teams ship software faster, offering their platform for Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD). Ultimately, the solution helps to map every source of change for software teams, so they can accelerate innovation and growth.
It is really good for building projects in the cloud. If you try to do build the project first locally and then push that stack to the cloud it could take a lot of time. In this way, it also consumes a lot of resources in the computer and in the network.
CircleCI is well suited if you, your developer, or team of developers have already worked with it in the past. They don't need to go through the learning curve of yet another Continuous Integration tool. Circle handles Continuous Integration workflows very well, including pretty complex workflows. With that said, Circle can get expensive if you need to run multiple containers in parallel and might not be as easy to setup as some alternatives, such as Jenkins.
Full customization and scripting abilities. Using tools like bash scripts, SSH, and Node, running almost anything upon committing some code to GitHub becomes possible.
Integration with all of our favorite services. GitHub and Slack in particular are crucial to our business and CircleCI's integration is seamless and full-featured.
Great config file syntax. Many CI services require you to perform advanced configuration in a UI. This is fine at first (and CircleCI offers this for many options available), but when you start needing to manage a large number of projects, committing configuration changes to a Git repository is more consistent and maintainable than making the change many different times manually in a UI.
It was difficult to create a branching strategy with GitHub. We had everything running from main, but in a true devops environment, we would like to incorporate a true branching strategy.
I would like to share build projects with each AWS account we utilize versus creating a build project in each account. It will allow us consistent deployments across the board.
The error logs are natively in AWS, but when developers do not have access, there is no way for them to view error logs for maintenance other than an admin who has access to share the error logs.
CircleCI mostly getting built into both upstream platforms (Github/Gitlab) and downstream platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP), in which cases it's often a better fit or can be used as a part of existing tooling
UX can be confusing to navigate and see what's happening.
It is a highly usable, well integrated CI/CD service, patricularly for AWS-centric organizations. It is a strong balance between simplicity and flexibility. Security was integrated with AWS Secrets Manager allowing secrets to be retrieved dynamically - a huge usability win for us. I did not enjoy the manual build for each environment
It's pretty snappy, even with using workflows with multiple steps and different docker images. I've seen builds take a long time if it's really involved, but from what I can tell, it's still at least on par if not faster than other build tools.
I haven't personally used their support service, but I have heard from others that they are responsive. I've also seen only one or two downtimes in over a year of use and both were no more than an hour or two.
I've used GitHub Actions compared to AWS CodeBuild - I enjoyed the integration with AWS from a codebuild perspective, but GitHub Actions and Workflows allowed us to create a reusable pipeline which is more in line with our devops structure. I enjoy AWS CodeBuild, but from a true continuous deployment, GitHub Actions was more fit.
Jenkins and Teamcity both have additional features that maybe you require, but they are also a lot more work to get set up and working. There's a much longer learning curve to getting these configured for a simple build. They're not hosted, so you have to maintain the infrastructure and scale yourself. They're both good products if you require more than CircleCI, but if not, skip the extra headache and go with something simple like CircleCI.
AWS CodeBuild was introduces as a core enabler for automating database deployments and enforcing a standardization across six environments. The standardization and quality control was well received.
Security was baked in reducing audit findings.
Deployments took minutes to update all environments compared to hours. It helped us a lot to reduce drift and deploy consistently.
