When comparing CircleCI vs TFS, the Slant community recommends CircleCI for most people. In the question“What are the best continuous integration tools?” CircleCI is ranked 6th while TFS is ranked 26th. The most important reason people chose CircleCI is:
CircleCI excels with its setup process. All that's needed is a GitHub login and CircleCI automatically detects the settings for Ruby, Python, Node.js, Java and Clojure. The setup process is their most widely praised feature.
Specs
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Pros
Pro Quick setup
CircleCI excels with its setup process. All that's needed is a GitHub login and CircleCI automatically detects the settings for Ruby, Python, Node.js, Java and Clojure. The setup process is their most widely praised feature.
Pro Simple and intuitive GitHub integration
CircleCI can be connected to any project that is hosted on GitHub by logging in using the GitHub OAuth and adding the desired repository.
Whenever a new commit is pushed to GitHub, CircleCI runs the tests that have been already defined and if none of them fails, the build is deployed to the runtime environment.
Pro SSH support
Users can access the Virtual Machine via SSH and run commands.
Pro Easy configuration with YAML
In most cases CircleCI automatically get settings from your code. When it fails, edit circle.yml.
Pro Very fast parallel testing
Tests can be parallelized across multiple machines reducing test times drastically. They support up to 8-way parallelization. Additionally, CircleCI caches the build environment.
Pro Clean, intuitive UI
Circle CI's web UI is clean and easy to use.
It gives all the information for a single build in a feed and gives the explanation for each step of the build, what it's doing and what the step is related to. On the top it displays author information and the time and date when the build was started and finished.
This is all done by giving only the most essential information without clogging the screen.
Pro Supports 8 languages and 16 databases
Support for Ruby, Python, Node, Java, PHP, RoR, DJ, JavaScript. It also detects settings for Ruby, Python, Node.js, Java and Clojure.
It als has support for: MySQL, MongoDB, PostgreSQL, Cassandra, Riak, Redis, SQLite, Solr, CouchDB, ElasticSearch, Neo4j, Couchbase, Lucene, Sphinx, ThriftDB, Memcache.
Pro Headless browser support
Alongside latest Chrome, Firefox and Webkit (installed using xvfb), CircleCi supports the use of Selenium, PhantomJS as well as tools like Capybara and Cucumber.
Pro Support for Queues
Support for RabbitMQ, Beanstalk and Resque through Redis.
Pro Supports Docker
CircleCI can continuously deliver Docker images to hosts that support Docker containers.
Pro Provides time taken for each step
Eg:
./1.setup.sh 48s
./2.build.sh 56s
With this information, it's easy to find out which line of the script is the bottleneck of the build process.
Pro Comprehensive cache dependencies
Can specify the cache dependencies on
- checksum "package.json"
- Branch
- BuildNum
- Revision
- Environment.variableName
For more details https://circleci.com/docs/2.0/caching/
Pro Intelligent notifications
CircleCI can notify via email, Hipchat, Campfire and more. And it does so only when necessary.
Pro Can test many code pushes concurrently
You can push multiple batches of code concurrently.
Pro Supports 10 Continuous Deployment solutions
Support for Heroku, AWS, Engine Yard, dotCloud, Fabric, Nodejitsu, AppFog, Capistrano, Rockspace, Joynet.
Integration with Heroku is solid with the ability to automatically deploy or merge branches.
CircleCI is also very flexible with the deployment arrangement allowing SSH key management, deployment freedom including directly to a PaaS, using Capistrano, Fabric, arbitrary bash commands, or by auto-merging to another branch, or packaging code up to S3.
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.
Cons
Con Changes the environment without warning
Unless you count forum posts as a warning. A mysql upgrade caused days of debugging.
Con Does not cache docker images
The way to fake it is to save the image on disk, in the cache folder (it tars it), and restore it afterwards. But in tests it was slower than not caching.
Con Docker is way outdated on the VM provided
Currently (October 5th 2016), Docker installed on the VM is: 1.9.1-circleci-cp-workaround, build 517b158, and docker-compose is 1.5.2, build 7240ff3. docker-compose in particular is almost too old to be used.
Con Not ready for use
While many components are complete, TFS itself is not ready for use.