Here’s the Deal

Shippable vs AWS CodeBuild

40 1

2 1

When comparing Shippable vs AWS CodeBuild, the Slant community recommends Shippable for most people. In the question“What are the best hosted continuous integration services?” Shippable is ranked 2nd while AWS CodeBuild is ranked 25th. 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

Docker supportYes

GitYes

MercurialNo

SVNGIT

No specs yet!

Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking

Common Questions

What are the best hosted continuous integration services?

Pros

Pro
Builds are faster

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.

Pro
Security

Scoped down IAM service roles and managed policies. AWS CloudTrail intergation for API access tracking. AWS Config integration for enforcing complaince rules. Native support for Parameter Store for storing/passing secrets securely to build container.

Pro
GitHub cloud, GitHub Enterprise and Bitbucket cloud support

Native support for AWS CodeCommit, S3 and popular git repositories, except GitLab and Bitbucket server.

Pro
Compliance

CodeBuild is compliant for PCI, ISO, SOC, and HIPAA workloads.

Pro
Documentation and support

Pretty thorough documentation and troubelshooting steps in the CodeBuild user guide @ https://docs.aws.amazon.com/codebuild/latest/userguide/welcome.html.

Questions on the service forum mostly gets prompt response @ https://forums.aws.amazon.com/forum.jspa?forumID=230

Pro
Availability

Had minimal to no issues with the service being available. Also, being an AWS service, it has regional endpoint across various AWS regions.

Pro
Amazon VPC integration

CodeBuild can access resources within a VPC from it's build containers. Useful for customers who have resources in an Amazon VPC, like RDS instance, ElastiCache, GitHub Enterprise source repo, artifact repo, etc.

Pro
On-demand CI. Zero queueing

Users get 20 or so concurrent builds per AWS account ID. Build start up within seconds with no queueing.

Pro
Windows support

Support for .NET builds using windowsservercore Docker containers. Preconfigured image have .NET Core and several other runtimes like Java, Node, Ruby. Supports custom images for proprietary tooling like full Visual Studio build targets.

Ad
Cons

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.

Con
No iOS support

Limited to Linux and Windows builds.

Con
No support for GitLab and Bitbucket server

Off the popular git based source control management system, Bitbucket server and GitLab cloud/on-prem is missing. Generic git support is also not available.