When comparing TFS vs Shippable, the Slant community recommends Shippable for most people. In the question“What are the best continuous integration tools?” Shippable is ranked 16th while TFS is ranked 26th. The most important reason people chose Shippable is:
The fact that Shippable runs inside of Docker means that it keeps a persistent state and every build will not have to revert to initial state where it needs to install every dependency from the ground up. Classic CI tools that run on virtual machines need to reset their environment every time and every time install the gems, packages and services needed.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Concurrent
TFS contains very few locks and aims to be as suitable for multithreaded
systems as possible. It makes use of multiple truly concurrent structures
to manage the data, and scales linearly by the number of cores. This is
perhaps the most important feature of TFS.
Pro Usable in other systems
It was never planned to be Redox-only.
Pro Revision history
TFS stores a revision history of every file without imposing extra
overhead. This means that you can revert any file into an earlier version,
backing up the system automatically and without imposed overhead from
copying.
Pro Data integrity
TFS, like ZFS, stores full checksums of the file (not just metadata), and
on top of that, it is done in the parent block. That means that almost all
data corruption will be detected upon read.
Pro Copy-on-write semantics
Similarly to Btrfs and ZFS, TFS uses CoW semantics, meaning that no cluster
is ever overwritten directly, but instead it is copied and written to a new
cluster.
Pro O(1) recursive copies
Like some other file systems, TFS can do recursive copies in constant time,
but there is an unique addition: TFS doesn't copy even after it is mutated.
How? It maintains segments of the file individually, such that only the
updated segment needs copying.
Pro Guaranteed atomicity
The system will never enter an inconsistent state (unless there is hardware
failure), meaning that unexpected power-off won't ever damage the system.
Pro Improved caching
TFS puts a lot of effort into caching the disk to speed up disk accesses.
It uses machine learning to learn patterns and predict future uses to
reduce the number of cache misses. TFS also compresses the in-memory cache,
reducing the amount of memory needed.
Pro Better file monitoring
CoW is very suitable for high-performance, scalable file monitoring, but
unfortunately only few file systems incorporate that. TFS is one of those.
Pro All memory safe
TFS uses only components written in Rust. As such, memory unsafety is only
possible in code marked unsafe, which is checked extra carefully.
Pro Full coverage testing
TFS aims to be full coverage with respect to testing. This gives relatively
strong guarantees on correctness by instantly revealing large classes of
bugs.
Pro Improved garbage collection
TFS uses Bloom filters for space-efficient and fast garbage collection. TFS
allows the FS garbage collector to run in the background without blocking
the rest of the file system.
Pro SSD friendly
TFS tries to avoid the write limitation in SSD by repositioning dead sectors.
Pro Full-disk compression
TFS is the first file system to incorporate complete full-disk compression
through a scheme we call RACC (random-access cluster compression). This
means that every cluster is compressed only affecting performance slightly.
It is estimated that you get 60-120% more usable space.
Pro Asynchronous
TFS is asynchronous: operations can happen independently; writes and
reads from the disk need not block.
Pro Builds are faster
The fact that Shippable runs inside of Docker means that it keeps a persistent state and every build will not have to revert to initial state where it needs to install every dependency from the ground up. Classic CI tools that run on virtual machines need to reset their environment every time and every time install the gems, packages and services needed.
Pro GitHub and Bitbucket integration
Shippable supports both BitBucket and GitHub. Repositories uploaded on either of those services can be built using Shippable.
Pro Free plan available
Unlimited builds for unlimited public repos and up to 5 private repositories.
Pro Docker integration
Shippable is built using Docker, a popular open source Linux container. It was originally built using it's own container but when that started to become too complex, they switched to using Docker. Since the beginning Shippable was different from other CI tools because while Shippable uses a container (Docker), traditionally CI tools have used virtual machines to manage their workloads.
Pro Quick setup
All Shippable needs for it's setup is a shippable.yml
file in the root of the repository that needs to be built. The bare minimum Shippable needs is the language and the version number specified in that file.
Pro Integrated code coverage and test results visualization
No need to use coveralls or any other tool for code coverage visualization. Code coverage and test results are integrated into the product.
Pro Build as Code
Builds are described in the shippable.yml file located in the root of your project. This empowers engineers to take responsibility for code delivery. If you are coming from Travis CI, Shippable reads your .travis.yml file directly so you can try it out painlessly.
Pro Build on your own host
Teams can set up Docker containers on their own servers and run Shippable in there.
Pro Supports monitoring and tracking utilization and system performance for your devops automation infrastructure
Pro Cheaper than competitors
Plans are significantly cheaper than competitors.
Pro Testing against multiple runtimes, versions and environments
Supports builds against multiple runtimes, environment variables, and platforms.
Pro 2X faster than any other platform
The accuracy & speed is 2x more compared to all the other available CI & CD platforms.
Cons
Con Not ready for use
While many components are complete, TFS itself is not ready for use.
Con Requires way to much permissions when logging in using Bitbucket
It even requests the permission to "Delete your repositories".
Con No Direct Deploy to S3
Currently, Shippable does not allow for build artifacts to be natively deployed to S3. This can be gotten around, however it is a rather large hole when compared to Travis.
In order to deploy to S3 you have to add a couple of lines to the yml file. For example:
env:
global:
#secure variable contains values for AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID and AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY
- secure: HKwYujx/qmsyQQdHvR2myu8HLUDtcLeDyYV149YJuxIV4J7Hk3SxeY8X3D6aTlR8mvMnd/ZFY+tGNUh4G0xtLLjjZcPsBgvFlB
build:
on_success:
- aws s3 sync $SHIPPABLE_BUILD_DIR "s3://bucket_name" --region "us-east-1"
Con Docker security measures may be a hindrance
Shippable runs inside Docker containers. Docker has some specific security measures which may or may not become a hindrance in using Shippable. It may be harder for users who are not very comfortable with a Linux container environment and that can create some security problems. Even for more advanced users, it's still something more that they have to address while using Shippable.
