CircleCI - Cloud-Hosted CI/CD

What do you like best about the product?

It is really easy to integrate with GitHub and Gitlab. On the other hand I really like that my team can easily take advantage of the platform to understand the problems that may occur with the pipelines, is really easy to identify the problem by checking logs and identify the step that is failing.

What do you dislike about the product?

The pricing page is a little bit confusing for me. But maybe this is just me because I'm not using this section very regularly, however when i enter I always forgot how to do the report I need and the UI is not very intuitive

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

We have the CI/CD pipelines inside CircleCI for the 2 main products in the company. A mobile application and the backend API that is used by all the clients inside our system. The benefit of having the pipelines here is that engineers can easily understand problems with deployments without the help from the DevOps team. They can easily understand the issues and fixing by themselves most of the cases

What do you like best about the product?

The Continious integration server is operating mainly online through Single sign on to Github or E-mail authentication. I shall confess that the integration server is fast. It was built to speed up releases. Besides, all those features, their cloud plans enpower their solution.

What do you dislike about the product?

I hope their customer support team will focus on customer success and satisfaction to include the customer feedback in their upcoming horizons.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

CircleCi sorts out the speed matter. It is faster than other solutions and was developed to get rid off this problem.
Besides, the solution is innovative. From ideas, reach concrete solutions and make them better through automation.
Also, It is a viable solution which is user friendly through the configuration of yaml files.

What do you like best about the product?

Ease of use, ease of implementation, nothing else!

What do you dislike about the product?

Occasional connectivity issues, nonsense 137 OOM and infrastructure failure which result in build failures with no part on our end. That costs us credits. 137 OOM error happens from time to time to our Node.JS application when their dashboard resources show that RAM consumption is only 50%. Support engineers do not thoroughly read and understand issues when email them at support@circleci.com and reply me with totally different context about the problem. Just yesterday, my web applications fail to `yarn build` after I downgrade the resource class from xlarge to large. Contacted support but no reply.

Billing is a fucking mess and nightmare! There are duplicate information in the bill downloaded from their website and when I asked for consolidated bill, they just answer don't have it. There is no transparency on how many build minutes and credits I spent each day both on their website and the monthly bill which make it difficult to understand when the monthly bill contains many refill item charges. It is difficult or impossible to track usage and burndown of my subscription and total outstanding refill amounts on a daily basis. For example, I went through the build history for the 3 days into the new billing cycle. There were a total of 74 build and when I sum up the duration of the build, it is 597m 41s. However, their fucking rubbish dashboard shows 4265 "Compute" minutes. Is this a SCAM?

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

CI/CD

What do you like best about the product?

The free tier of CircleCI includes 30,000 which is usually enough for small projects. It is pretty easy to use it once u get the hang of including CircleCI in your projects. You can even SSH into the build so that if any issue arises you can solve it directly in the machine, instead of trying to figure out where the issue is locally.

What do you dislike about the product?

The initial setup for CircleCI can be a bit more complex when compared to other tools like Github actions, but it's nothing that a bit of introspection cannot solve. Also when using Docker layer caching the credits run out too fast. There should be a warning for the same , since I did not realize that caching would use so many credits.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

I was able to integrate CircleCI successfully into one of our projects on Github, so we dont have to worry anymore about breaking changes being pushed into the repo. You can SSH into the build so that if any issue arises you can solve it directly in the machine, instead of trying to figure out where the issue is locally.

What do you like best about the product?

CircleCI is easy to set up and manage.
You can easily create projects in CircleCI and configure config.yml to define your CI pipeline.
We have set up multiple projects in CircleCI, and CI pipelines are working fine.
CircleCI also gives an option to setup a self-hosted runner where you are not dependent on Circle CI backend infra to run your pipelines.

What do you dislike about the product?

Sometimes CI pipelines may fail if they run on Circle CI infra due to unavailability or high load.
We ran multiple CI/CD pipelines in Circle CI and did not see many issues.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

We have set up multiple projects in CircleCI, and CI pipelines are working fine.
We have also set up self-hosted runners in Circle CI which is helping us to use our own infra to run pipelines.
CircleCI is easy to setup and manage.