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Always responsive, listens to the problem.... at times resolutions are not available though
What do you like best about the product?
- responsiveness: it has automated bee bot to acknowledge a request soon followed by someone in real to do initial acknowledgement/evaluation.
- reachability: we are confident that someone is within reach to help us
- reachability: we are confident that someone is within reach to help us
What do you dislike about the product?
Sometimes issues/requests that we honestly feel important need to go through a series of justifications and push back and non optimal workarounds, if available.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
- Enhancement needs to plugins.
- Guidance and solutions to custom CICD needs.
- Guidance and solutions to custom CICD needs.
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Cloudbees Support feels like they are part of MY team
What do you like best about the product?
1. They were persistant in contacting me, as I missed 2 appointments, but they still gave me a chance to make a third appointment.
2. The understanding of the issue was quick
3. The resolution was quick and simple
2. The understanding of the issue was quick
3. The resolution was quick and simple
What do you dislike about the product?
1. I was not provided working examples
2. They did not ask me about my objectives, or the complete environment
3. They could have asked me questions to evaluate how I am using Jenkins and propose improvements
2. They did not ask me about my objectives, or the complete environment
3. They could have asked me questions to evaluate how I am using Jenkins and propose improvements
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
CI/CD for 8 teams , and scalable solution which we can offer as service
CloudBees Jenkins Support
What do you like best about the product?
CloudBees Jenkins Support Engineers are mostly proactive and are good regarding follow up with their clients.
What do you dislike about the product?
Different support engineers are assigned to tickets from the same organization. Many times we would have to request a specific support engineer to look into the issue.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Troubleshooting and analyzing the root cause of crashes.
CloudBees Jenkins Enterprise
What do you like best about the product?
CloudBees always ahead of moulding their product to fit for current trends and technologies. They brought CloudBees Jenkins Platform and then PaaS solution (with mesos) and now Kubernetes.
What do you dislike about the product?
Product is designed to fit for CloudBased platforms than on-prem.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Our entire tool chain is integrated with CloudBees Jenkins, we achieved a complete CI/CD workflow.
CB Support is awesome
What do you like best about the product?
The CB support team members are easygoing, knowledgable and I got quick responses all the time.
What do you dislike about the product?
The CB support team members are fantastic and I got nothing for this question :)
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
We worked with CB support to help one of our customers migrate from Dev@Cloud to hosted Jenkins in the customer's AWS account. The migration went very well with the great support from CB.
It has drastically improved our workflows and the speed of our troubleshooting
We use it primarily for the commercial support, and there are some plugins which make integration and scripting a little easier on the commercial side. Our primary use case is being able to call somebody and know a lot about Jenkins. However, we don't pretend to be Jenkins experts, since we are not Jenkins coders. We can just call somebody and have assistance instantly, which is the reason we chose to use CloudBees. The support is there when you need it.
We have not been using it that long. We have only been using it for a little more than six months. It was a migration from Jenkins to CloudBees, which was seamless.
How has it helped my organization?
Prior to using CloudBees, if we couldn't figure something out, we would try to figure it out. We would waste a couple hours, or weeks, on some particularly hairy issues. It slowed us down. We had more people focusing on our build management systems than we had focusing on using it, in some cases.
CloudBees drastically improved our workflows. If something didn't work, we could have it working again. We weren't spending time troubleshooting and Googling for stuff. E.g., "We know this guy had a similar issue. We will contact him and see what he did about it."
When we hit a barrier, we hit a barrier. We had to almost guess and feel our way in the dark at how we could get around it. Now, we still hit barriers. While there are some cases where we submit an issue, and they say, "Give us a couple days to look at the particularly issue, because it is a hairy issue." It always comes back with an answer. Importantly, it's access to an entire company of knowledgeable people.
While we can't abuse these relationships, we can call them and know that they aree there. We pay for it. and they are okay with us calling them. It's a different thing than, "Well, I know Bob, so I will call Bob." I can't call Bob every week.
The benefit is support and the speed that it provides for troubleshooting.
What is most valuable?
All its technical features are valuable, but we could do 90 percent of those with Jenkins. The difference with CloudBees is when one of those features doesn't work, we can't figure it out, or it doesn't work the way we expect to there is somebody that we can contact who can make it work.
What needs improvement?
CloudBees has a lot of features. It has a core product with some special build stuff and purchase, which is great, but where they can improve is around the messaging. We use it for support, but a lot of our clients could possibly use some of the other features around it.
As an example, the Kubernetes skew stuff. A lot of people are just using the plugins for Jenkins, but it's not clear to a lot of our clients why they need CloudBees, because it's a hidden away thing. E.g., you are using the internet, but you don't usually think about what it takes to keep it on. In a lot of cases, the people making the purchasing decisions don't understand why Jenkins isn't enough. "Why do we need that? My team knows Jenkins." Great, your team knows Jenkins, but they don't know all of Jenkins. They know the pieces they use, which is fine. They shouldn't know all of Jenkins, because that's not what they're meant to be doing. They're meant to be using it for coding, etc.
I still find the messaging really confusing. It's not immediately clear what the value-add is yet. It's not clear enough to pitch it in an easy, prepackaged way. If you already know their ecosystem, it's easy to figure out. However, if you don't, you have to learn their ecosystem first. The guys who are making the purchasing decisions are usually not the ones who will take the time to learn the ecosystem. If we had to justify the solution less, then we could just slide them some information which would be simple to consume. This would make our lives a lot easier.
For how long have I used the solution?
Less than one year.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
I have not noticed any stability problems. No crashes come to mind, but we have not been using it for an extremely long time. We may eventually see issues, but I don't think so. We have found them to be stable, and previously, we found Jenkins to be stable. I imagine things will continue to be stable.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
In terms of the scalability aspect, some of our customers do a release every two weeks. They roll up on the small side of approximately 30 different containers into a release and deploy to a couple environments, then rollout a week later. Other clients are doing 50 releases a day, because every time that they modify code, it builds something new. They are deploying into an environment per developer, an integration environment, and end-to-end.
This is partly a test of the scaling's usability. However, we haven't seen an issue. Our biggest environment has about 50 active users with about a couple hundred different services being built. We've occasionally had to resize a VM and give it more resources, etc., but we have not noticed any blockers where we can't move faster. Sometimes, we have to give it more horsepower, but beyond that, I can't think of a case where we've hit a wall.
I think we have hit the upper maximum on what we will ever need in terms of scaling. Their license model makes it easy to break out from that. If we need to break up projects into multiple build systems, that's fine too. I don't see any hidden scalability issues.
How is customer service and technical support?
A lot of our team who speaks with their technical support are heavily technical. Traditional support is used to dealing with the managers or an IT department. Development doesn't usually call support, because they tent to want to fix it and discover it themselves. I have noticed a lot of our developers are comfortable calling CloudBees, or speaking to them in general, whether it be on Slack, email, or calls. They tend to work alongside you, so it feels like a colleague helping you with your issue, more than it does just some random person. At heart, they are a group of developers too.
Everyone who has spoken with them has said that they interfaced well with our development team. The main people who are calling them on a case-to-case basis have found this really nice. We have great interaction with them: It's not an us versus them. When we call them, they are temporarily part of our team. They come in, and they help us, then they go away after. However, they are right there when we need them. This is a completely different model than a lot of other software solutions.
Which solutions did we use previously?
Because it is Jenkins, ultimately in the core, all of our Jenkins plugins with it worked. That was a big boon. Usually, when you switch to a product, you have re-evaluate everything. We didn't. We just moved our plugins over. Everything just worked, and where it didn't, they helped us fix it.
How was the initial setup?
The initial configuration and integration was seamless. We migrated from Jenkins. As we had originally done our built in Jenkins, except for the fact that it was a slight version upgrade, it was seamless to move over to CloudBees. All of our integrations continued to work.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
Their support model is a recurring model. It is not a one-off fee. We pay on a yearly basis. We are already gearing up to justify our user license count for next year. When it comes time for renewal, we will have to tell all of our projects and customers why that cost is there. While we will be able to justify it, I feel like if they could add more information that it would make it easier for us.
I can't tell you if we purchased it direct or from the AWS Marketplace.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
We had already done an evaluation of Jenkins versus other products, such as CircleCI and a bunch of the other ones, and we had already settled on Jenkins. When we moved to CloudBees, at that point, it was a question of open source, which we're fine with, versus commercial support. We needed the commercial support and had already settled on Jenkins. We were comfortable with Jenkins features and just needed the support.
What other advice do I have?
We use it for everything from from building a container to deploying a container, and in some cases, for kicking off environment creation. It integrates well with other products in our AWS environment. The core concept is fully scriptable. We do use it to integrate, and it is infinitely integratable with everything in AWS.
It depends on what product that you want on CloudBees, but if you want the support or core stuff, it's absolutely a no-brainer to just go to CloudBees. You don't have to change much at all.
It's like when you have a cell phone, and you buy the same brand on a newer version. You do the WiFi sync, then all your pictures, contacts, and everything else comes over automatically. This is the same thing. If you're on Jenkins already, and you're happy with it and not looking to move products, just needing support and additional features, CloudBees is a no-brainer. I wouldn't even evaluate other products. I would just look at them.
If you're in the mood to just look at products similar to this, I would suggest installing a few of the big commercial ones. If you're working at CloudBees, you're obviously into the commercial side of it. This means that you will be looking at things, such as CloudBees, CircleCI, and a couple of the other big ones, depending on what features you need.
The unfortunate things with build systems and a lot of code bases is you can't fully implement them as a test, because of the amount of hours, especially if you're switching (though not in all cases). If you're switching it can be a huge time sync to implement to evaluate. If you pick a simple project, there are a bunch of GitHub projects which are meant to sample applications for learning build systems. Install one of those and use all the systems on that one and get a feel for what they offer you.
It has easy connectivity for getting our pipelines into the cloud on AWS
The primary use case is CI/CD.
How has it helped my organization?
It has improved our pipeline automation. It has been there from the initial phases, just manually deploying everything that we need to by doing the builds. It does all the sanity checks to having a completely automated pipeline. This is where we sit now. It has been there all the way along the road for us.
It does everything that we need it to do for our team.
What is most valuable?
It works. It has easy connectivity for getting our pipelines into the cloud on AWS. We have no complaints, as it has always done what we wanted it to do.
What needs improvement?
Nothing is perfect, and there is room for improvement in the product. I am reserving judgment for the unknown.
For how long have I used the solution?
One to three years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
Our team does not put much stress on it, but it's a shared instance. I'm sure enterprise-wide that there's a lot of stress. Teams are constantly building and deploying, but it works seamlessly for us. We don't see any performance degradation.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
It is being used enterprise-wide. We have never had any performance issues. It does what it's supposed to do.
How is customer service and technical support?
We have not used the technical support.
From an organizational perspective having technical support available, even though we haven't needed it, is definitely a nice thing to have rather than rely on the open source community as a whole for a baseline product like Jenkins. It is worth the money to have that support available when you need it.
Which solutions did we use previously?
We were using an open source version of it, Jenkins. When we found out it was available enterprise-wide and a license already existed, we transitioned into it.
How was the initial setup?
The integration and configuration of CloudBees in our AWS environment was pretty much plug and play. We have admin rights anytime we need to plug into a new service. We just download a plugin, and it spins up and works.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
Pricing must be fair because we just renewed our license a couple months ago.
What other advice do I have?
Gives devs granular access to what is required rather than a generic login with broad access
We use it with software development of FMCG e-commerce websites.
How has it helped my organization?
It allows us to continuously deliver new builds quickly.
Also, devs at different levels can get granular access to whatever is required rather than getting a generic-style login that gives them access to large sections. This provides an audit trail for mistakes (not for finger-pointing but just to learn from them).
What is most valuable?
* Ease of access control (granular)
* Scalability
* Analytics
What needs improvement?
It can be slow producing Beekeeper reports but I think this was ironed out in a later release. (It was a multi-thread issue).
There are a lot of features, so some really good learning materials in various formats would be handy. I know there are a lot of webinars, but more high-level resources would be great for new staff; we all had to start somewhere.
How was the initial setup?
AWS makes it simple to use most products, as that’s its bread and butter: "Whatever you want to use, we can provide you with an environment." And it's the same with CloudBees. It’s no different to loading into a server in a back room, offshore, near-shore, virtual environment, etc. We didn’t have issues setting it up to run in a container on a Linux machine.
It's super-simple to start a stack, bootstrap, IAM role, SSH key pair, command-line updates, etc. These are fundamentals of AWS anyway.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
We chose to procure this solution via AWS Marketplace because the devs are a load of button-pushers so they are always trialing software on AWS to see how we can leverage AWS’ flexibility, scalability, and granular pricing model. Also, it made sense for us to use this as we had multiple clients. We got great control out of our builds this way.
What other advice do I have?
It provides better visual reporting for the data
We use it for migrating and scaling Jenkins infrastructure.
How has it helped my organization?
It provides better visual reporting for the data, whether it succeeded or failed. It also has a lot of plugins.
What is most valuable?
* It has a wide variety of plugins.
* It has a good reporting solution.
What needs improvement?
The integrations with Kubernetes has become challenging when it comes to scaling on a machine. We don't have the proper agent release to do this.
For how long have I used the solution?
Less than one year.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
We haven't had any stability issues.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
We don't have any scaling issues. We have about 400 servers with three Jenkins masters.
How is customer service and technical support?
I would rate the technical support as an eight out of ten. We are receiving constant support from the cloud-based support team.
How was the initial setup?
With Kubernetes and the cloud-based configuration, it is a little tricky. We are still trying to figure out the best way to do it.
What was our ROI?
We have dedicated Jenkins masters for our different teams. This way, teams are not stepping on each others toes. They can build something and it is ready, then export their jobs to the main master.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
They need to improve the licensing. With a few of the companies, when you have the agent installed, once the instance dies, you are released from the license. However, with cloud-based, you have to contact the cloud-based support to release the license and map it to the new instance.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
We looked at Jenkins and Bitbucket Pipelines. Since our developers were already used to the Jenkins infrastructure, we continued building on top of our previous platform using the cloud infrastructure.
We had been using Jenkins for the last six years and wanted to continue with the same type of infrastructure.
What other advice do I have?
I would recommend this product rather building your own homegrown solution.
It was easy to integrate into our AWS environment, but it needs scripting in other languages.
We use it for CI/CD (continuous integration and continuous delivery).
How has it helped my organization?
It does continuous deployment and development. Plus, all the ways that it does deployment into the various environments.
What needs improvement?
It needs scripting in other languages and support for it.
For how long have I used the solution?
One to three years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
We put a lot of stress on the product, as it is used every day for development.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
We have between 100 to 200 engineers using the product.
How is customer service and technical support?
I have never used technical support.
How was the initial setup?
It was easy to integrate into our AWS environment.
Cloudbees also integrates with Bitbucket.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
We chose to go through the AWS Marketplace because of scalability.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
We did not evaluate any other products.
What other advice do I have?
Play with it a lot before you do anything for real.
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