Built on Python, Salt is an event-driven automation tool and framework to deploy, configure, and manage complex IT systems. Salt is used to automate common infrastructure administration tasks and ensure that all the components of infrastructure are operating in a consistent desired state.
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TeamCity
Score 7.4 out of 10
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TeamCity is a continuous integration server from Czeck company JetBrains.
Managing heterogeneous environments of large numbers of nodes, especially nodes which may need sudden changes (security updates, for instance), or frequent replacement, is a strength for Saltstack. Simplicity is not a strength for Saltstack. In a homogenous environment (all CentOS 7, for example, with no Debian or Windows) I might recommend using Ansible instead - it is less flexible and granular, but simpler to configure.
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
A superb remote execution framework! SaltStack allows us to easily program numerous functions on top of it. For example, we developed a fast parallel asynchronous deployment tool that handles all software deployment, including interdependent service management.
Configuration management is now easy. We take advantage of this to automate (in tandem with AWS tools) the stand-up of all servers and services. It is also relatively easy to create new configuration management states for software not yet supported by the community (e.g. Grafana).
Flexibility. Numerous small utilities have been built which simply wrap around SaltStack to allow tedious tasks to become easy.
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.
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.
We haven't had to spend a lot of time talking to support, and we've only had one issue, which, when dealing with other vendors is actually not that bad of an experience.
I've used shell scripts over ssh, custom in-house deployment tools, Chef, and SaltStack. I've evaluated Ansible, but I was never happy with performance over SSH. Chef's loose configuration data model and lack of philosophy and conventions around use makes it difficult for a team to share responsibility for configuration code. Needing to use additional tools to do orchestration for cross-host/agent dependency relationships made me look for more. SaltStack, while not as mature when I first tried it, impressed me with its speed and elegant design
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.
