Bamboo vs Jenkins: Showdown Of CI/CD Tools

Continuous integration and continuous delivery is a method to derive delivery consistency in an SDLC. As a process, it helps you automate your development pipeline while making sure everything is tracked. The interesting part is the introduction of automation into the stages of development. When we talk about integration and delivery, one more process that gets aligned with it is “continuous testing” or what we sometimes call DevOps testing.

While Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery (CD) has become a big part of DevOps, DevOps teams often land themselves in a fix when selecting the best tools. This can’t be imagined without the CI/CD tools that make it possible.

Does an open-source tool suit your project requirements or should you opt for a proprietary tool? What about the feature updates and existing customer feedback?

My team is often haunted by these glaring questions, encouraging us to do a comparison of various CI/CD tools. In this article, we will carefully breakdown Bamboo vs Jenkins and ensure that you have deeper insights to make the right choice of CI/CD tools.

TABLE OF CONTENT

• Introduction to Jenkins
• Introduction to Bamboo Server
• Bamboo vs Jenkins- Detailed Comparison
• Bamboo vs Jenkins Comparison Snapshot
• Bamboo vs Jenkins: Which CI/CD tool should you choose?

Before we get down to a detailed Bamboo vs Jenkins comparison, let’s start with the basics first.

What Is Jenkins?

Jenkins is one of the widely-used CI/CD tools in the market today. It has been in usage for a long time and is suited for organizations that are looking for an ideal open-source CI/CD tool. Written in java, Jenkins provides you with a plethora of features and portability with major platforms.

Being open-source and free to use, Jenkins is the most preferred choice for early-stage startups. Many growth-stage organizations also prefer Jenkins, as they can accelerate software product development through automation. Jenkins is available for use on platforms like Windows, macOS, and different flavors of Unix such as openSUSE, Red Hat, Ubuntu, and more.

Jenkins is extensible and has a thriving plugin ecosystem. Plugins in Jenkins help in the integration of various DevOps stages. It follows two release lines – Weekly and LTS (Long Term Support), similar to other commonly used open-source projects.

At the time of this Bamboo vs Jenkins article, the latest version of Jenkins (LTS) was 2.235.1, and Jenkins (Weekly) was 2.242 respectively.

Main Features of Jenkins

• Free and Open-Source
• Great plugins
• Extensive community
• Supports pipelines
• Support for parallel execution
• Extensive integration capabilities
• Easy setup
• Offers REST APIs

What Is Bamboo?

Bamboo Server is also a popular tool for Continuous Integration (CI). It was developed by Atlassian in 2007, the organization is popularly known for project tracking software – JIRA. Bamboo is a commercial product that lets you perform automated builds, tests, and releases together in a single workflow.

With the Bamboo server, you get end-to-end visibility into the release, implementation, quality, and status with seamless integration of Jira and Bitbucket servers. It also comes with features such as built-in deployment support, automated merging, and Git branching. Bamboo supports programmed stretching and combining. Bamboo is available for platforms such as Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. At the time of this Bamboo vs Jenkins article, the latest version of the Bamboo server was 7.0.3.

Main Features of Bamboo

• Seamless migration from Jenkins to Bamboo
• Built-in Jira Software and Bitbucket Server integrations
• Built-in Git branching workflows
• Built-in deployment Projects
• Test automation
• Support for parallel execution
• Offers REST APIs
• Easy setup

Let us now do a face-off between Bamboo vs Jenkins and witness how the tools fare with respect to usability, support, and other integral features essential for good CI/CD tools.

Also, check out Jenkins vs GitLab CI

Face-off between Bamboo vs Jenkins

Now that you have been introduced to the CI/CD tools in question, it is time to get down to business. Below are the major parameters that we have used for Bamboo vs Jenkins comparison:

Installation and Configuration

Jenkins is easy to install considering that it is a self-contained Java program that can be run out of the box. One must have Java installed on the target machine and prior to that, the installation is quite simple. Jenkins supports JDK8 and recent versions have also started supporting Java 11 environments.

Once installed, the check for configuration is performed using a simple web interface. The setup for Jenkins is available for Windows, Mac OS X, and popular flavors of the Unix operating system. We can also run Jenkins as a servlet in different Java servlet containers such as GlassFish or Apache Tomcat. However, Jenkins lacks hands-on support but boasts a massive community to support you with queries. Since it’s an open-source tool, this can be justified.

There are more steps involved in the installation and configuration of the Bamboo server as compared to that of Jenkins. Per usual, Java needs to be installed on your machine and then, a dedicated user has to be created for running Bamboo. Here a home directory has to be created, post which you can start and configure the Bamboo server according to your requirements. The installation might be a little time-taking but you would find Bamboo to be more user friendly in terms of its user interface.

As far as ease for setting up and configuring the respective CI/CD tools is concerned, both Jenkins and Bamboo stand well. This parameter can also be subjective to assess as it depends on your requirements.

Extensibility and Customization

Jenkins and Bamboo both offer RESTful API for extensibility. Bamboo REST APIs can be used if you plan to integrate your application with the Bamboo server. It can also be used by administrators that plan to have interactions with the Bamboo server in their scripts. The default response format is JSON but there is an option to request XML instead of JSON.

The remote-access APIs for Jenkins are available for Python, XML, and JSON. Like APIs in Bamboo, Jenkins APIs can also be leveraged for actions such as triggering a new build, creating jobs, getting consumption related information from Jenkins, and more.

Ease of Use

When it comes to user-friendliness, Bamboo is a winner by a huge margin in the Bamboo vs Jenkins battle. Bamboo has a friendly and intuitive user-interface, which can be customized as per the user requirements. But does it downvote Jenkins? Absolutely not! It totally depends on your approach towards these tools. Once you start using Jenkins, you realize that their primary focus is on functionality and the secondary focus is on usability.

Whenever a new task is added in Bamboo, it provides you detailed information about the build and deployment status. As far as Jenkins is concerned, developers can leverage the richness of plugins in Jenkins to customize the experience as per their convenience.

You’ll have to strike a balance between functionality and user-friendliness when it comes to choosing better CI/CD tools between Bamboo vs Jenkins.

Plugin Ecosystem

Plugins provide greater functionality to CI/CD tools but you need to be picky about the ones that will help you. One of the major advantages of Jenkins over Bamboo is its thriving plugin ecosystem. As Jenkins is open-source, the global community is strong and contributing which can be proved by the wide availability of plugins. At present, there are 1500+ community-contributed Jenkins plugins that help in building, DevOps testing, deploying, and automating a project.

On the other hand, there are close to 200 Bamboo plugins (or add-ons) on the Atlassian marketplace. Built-in integration with Bitbucket, Jira, and Confluence are the biggest USPs of the Bamboo server.

As Jenkins is more functionality-centric (via plugins), the customization is cost-effective which, in turn, nullifies the costly in-house customization. Jenkins plugins are way ahead of the competition due to its large volume.

Hosting (Cloud or On-Premise)

Bamboo is only available in the on-premises variant, as the cloud version was discontinued in early 2017. Although the service was replaced with BitBucket pipelines but a replacement couldn’t match the Bamboo cloud.

On the contrary, Jenkins is available in both cloud-based and on-premise variants. Jenkins is best-suited for installation on the cloud for self-hosted pipelines. Architecting for scale using Jenkins is a good reference if you plan to use an on-premise variant of Jenkins for the DevOps testing or development.

Jenkins has a clear-cut upper hand when it comes to CI/CD tools on the cloud.

Parallelism

Parallel builds are supported in Jenkins as well as Bamboo. As per the Bamboo server, each stage has a single job by default but it can be used to group multiple jobs. For executing jobs in parallel in Bamboo, there has to be more than one agent (i.e. jobs are processed in parallel on multiple agents). Each stage has to complete all its jobs before the next stage in the plan can be executed.

• Tasks execute sequentially within a Job
• Jobs execute in parallel within a Stage
• Stages execute sequentially within a Plan

On the other hand, parallelism in Jenkins boils down to its pipeline. We can-

• Configure tests to run in parallel based on our choice of language
• Configure Jenkins builds as Parameterized builds
• Configure Jenkins project by setting it as a Matrix Project

The Parallel Test Executor plugin further helps you in dividing test units of the same size, which are then converted to an exclusion list. However, only partial parallelism is supported in Jenkins for DevOps testing since the same environment is shared by the builds. This factor can cause problems when a shared resource like a filesystem is used.

Parallelism with Bamboo and Jenkin for DevOps testing work as per the user expectation and there is no clear winner for this factor in the Bamboo vs Jenkins face-off.

We also have an interesting comparison between TeamCity vs. Jenkins.

#devops #jenkins

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Travis CI vs Jenkins: Which CI/CD Tool Is Right For You?

As a DevOps professional, you need to evaluate these tools based on your budget, project requirements, and other data points. This is why we take a deep dive into  Travis CI vs Jenkinscomparison to help you decide the right CI/CD tool for your project requirements.

If you are new to DevOps and are just learning the basics then I recommend you to read this detailed article on  Continuous Integration And Continuous Delivery. Without further ado, let’s get started.

What Is Jenkins?

Jenkins is a popular open-source CI/CD tool that is in usage for a long time. The tool is written entirely in Java. Jenkins has a powerful set of features that can be used to build, test, and integrate changes in a project.

It is the go-to choice for startups as it is free to use, supports a wide range of plugins, and is backed by a vibrant community. Developers get the chance to set up a CI/CD environment in Jenkins. Jenkins is available for a wide range of platforms – Windows, macOS, and various flavors of Unix (i.e. Ubuntu, OpenSUSE, and more).

Another major of Jenkins is its extensibility with plugins. Like other open-source projects, Jenkins maintains two release lines – weekly and LTS (Long Term Support). At the time of this article, the latest version of Jenkins (LTS) was 2.235.1.

Salient features of Jenkins

• Open source and free for use.
• Extensive plugin ecosystem.
• Vibrant community.
• Supports parallel execution.
• Ease to set up.
• Offers REST API.
• Can be configured using Jenkinsfile.

#devops #continous delivery #jenkins ci #ci cd #travis ci #continous deployment #jenkins architecture

Serverless CI/CD on the AWS Cloud

CI/CD pipelines have long played a major role in speeding up the development and deployment of cloud-native apps. Cloud services like AWS lend themselves to more agile deployment through the services they offer as well as approaches such as Infrastructure as Code. There is no shortage of tools to help you manage your CI/CD pipeline as well.

While the majority of development teams have streamlined their pipelines to take full advantage of cloud-native features, there is still so much that can be done to refine CI/CD even further. The entire pipeline can now be built as code and managed either via Git as a single source of truth or by using visual tools to help guide the process.

The entire process can be fully automated. Even better, it can be made serverless, which allows the CI/CD pipeline to operate with immense efficiency. Git branches can even be utilized as a base for multiple pipelines. Thanks to the three tools from Amazon; AWS CodeCommit, AWS CodeBuild, and AWS CodeDeploy, serverless CI/CD on the AWS cloud is now easy to set up.

#aws #aws codebuild #aws codecommit #aws codedeploy #cd #cd pipeline #ci #ci/cd processes #ci/cd workflow #serverless

Bamboo vs. Jenkins: Difference Between Bamboo and Jenkins [2021]

Introduction

Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Development (CD) plays a big part in an agile development process. Software testing teams often find themselves in a fix when it comes to selecting the best tools for continuous testing. Both Jenkins and Bamboo are the automation testing tools that are used for continuous integration. This article focuses on the comparison between the two best tools to help you in making an informed decision.

Before diving into the differences between these two tools, you must understand the basics of Bamboo and Jenkins.

#bamboo #bamboo vs. jenkins #jenkins

Bamboo vs. Jenkins: Difference Between Bamboo and Jenkins [2021]

Introduction

Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Development (CD) plays a big part in an agile development process. Software testing teams often find themselves in a fix when it comes to selecting the best tools for continuous testing. Both Jenkins and Bamboo are the automation testing tools that are used for continuous integration. This article focuses on the comparison between the two best tools to help you in making an informed decision.

Before diving into the differences between these two tools, you must understand the basics of Bamboo and Jenkins.

#bamboo #bamboo vs. jenkins #jenkins

13 Jenkins Alternatives for Continuous Integration

In our previous article , we discussed the most common problems with Jenkins  that made us search for an alternative. That’s why in this article, we’re offering a list of the most common Jenkins alternatives for continuous integration.

#uncategorized #ci/cd #ci/cd pipeline #continuous integration #gitlab ci #jenkins #jenkins alternatives