Comment by habosa
18 days ago
Dead on. GitHub Actions is the worst CI tool I’ve ever used (maybe tied with Jenkins) and Buildkite is the best. Buildkite’s dynamic pipelines (the last item in the post) are so amazingly useful you’ll wonder how you ever did without them. You can do super cool things like have your unit test step spawn a test de-flaking step only if a test fails. Or control test parallelism based on the code changes you’re testing.
All of that on top of a rock-solid system for bringing your own runner pools which lets you use totally different machine types and configurations for each type of CI job.
Highly, highly recommend.
Jenkins had a lot of issues and I’m glad to not be using it overall, but I did like defining pipelines in Groovy and I’ll take Groovy over YAML all day.
Jenkins, like many complex tools, is as good or bad as you make it. My last two employers had rock solid Jenkins environments because they were set up as close to vanilla as possible.
But yes, Groovy is a much better language for defining pipelines than YAML. Honestly pretty much any programming language at all is better than YAML. YAML is fine for config files, but not for something as complex as defining a CI pipeline.
What kills me is when these things add like control flow constructs to YAML.
Like just use an actual programming language!
biggest flaw of jenkins is that by default it runs on builder env, as it was made pre-container era. But I do like integration with viewing tests and benchmarks directly in the project, stuff that most CI/CD systems lack
what's wrong with Jenkins? It's battle tested and hardened. Works flawless even with thousands of tasks, and WORKS OUT OF THE BOX.
imo top 10 best admin/devs free software written in past 25 years.
It's too old and easy-to-use for anyone to hype it up as the next cool thing.
Buildkite has been around since 2013, hardly the next hype train
I mean all CIs work out of the box, although I have no interest in self hosting CI.
Jenkins is probably a bit like Java, technically it is fine. The problem is really where/who typically uses it and as there is so much freedom it is really easy to make a monster. Where as for Go it is a lot harder to write terrible unmaintainable code compared to Java.