Jenkins Is Getting Old – and We Need an Alternative | Hacker News Reader

Jenkins Is Getting Old – and We Need an Alternative

microtica.com

7 pointssavovaleks18 comments

As others have noted this is a thinly veiled PR piece (nothing wrong with it, but the angle is not immediately apparent).

From the post:

> With Jenkins, you can try and build a CD platform yourself, but be aware you’ll need a whole team for it, a load of time and maintenance. Microtica enables you to define complex cloud infrastructure through full integration with AWS and Kubernetes. Automate your deployments and deliver on the cloud with confidence.

Not surprising then that it doesn't even mention all the widely used alternatives: CircleCI, GitLab, Travis, etc.

There are... many alternatives? CircleCI, BuildKite, Travis, GitLab, GitHub Actions, Harness, and many more. Has been the case for years. Microtica is a little late to the party methinks.

Jenkins is fantastic, my only issue with it is that I can't decide if I like Groovy or hate it.

This is really bad form though, advertising your proprietary product by bashing a popular open source version. Your build process is something you don't want to have to rewrite just because some executive got taken out to lunch. I can't imagine any non free alternative gaining any traction.

I've written quite a bit of Groovy code and IME that never changes. It's a very pragmatic and productive language, but whenever you run into some bug or weird edge case you'll rue the day James Strachan was born. :)

This is basically a commercial right?

I don't see the suggestion as a viable replacement for Jenkins in its entirety. They identified that the Free aspect of Jenkins leads to its popularity, and they both compliment and criticize the plugins ecosystem. Their don't appear to have an open solution, and while they claim you won't need plugins, but part of what makes Jenkins so popular, is that if the default functionality doesn't work, you can find or make a plugin. This is lacking in the proposed solution.

"Code doesn't rust" and if Jenkins still works fine, why replace it?

Because the CI and hosting platform ecosphere has changed a lot in the last 10 years. If Jenkins has not adapted to suit the needs of devops engineers, then engineers will find something that does.

You can put pipelines into Git. What else do you need?

I'm completely ignorant in Jenkins regard, but does it do anything extra that Gitlab CI/Github Actions/Bitbucket Pipelines & co doesn't do?

I haven't done much with the others, but I can't imagine there is much difference. Jenkins has a ton of plugins, but the biggest reason I would choose it over the ones you listed is so that you're not locked in to a specific provider. At work quite a few people were using gitlabCI, but recently corporate signed a deal with microsoft to use GitHub. So now everyone using gitlab ci is going to have to recreate their deployment process.

You can buy Jenkins via capex vs depend on the internet and subscribe monthly on the other?

Gitlab does have a self hosted option, though it is still a subscription.

Worth noting that you don't have to self-host your GitLab instance to self-host your CI/CD runners. You can configure gitlab.com and use your own tightly controlled infrastructure for running CI/CD.

You can self host Gitlab entirely, no subscription needed.

Agreed, though the paid plan might have more parity with whatever they were doing with Jenkins.

These days, I mostly use Github Actions for build and something like deployer or Octopus Deploy.

In the past with on-prem build farms, I would use GoCD (https://www.gocd.org/)

Consider https://zuul-ci.org/ , perhaps?

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