What is Java EE and what are its top alternatives?
Top Alternatives to Java EE
- Java
Java is a programming language and computing platform first released by Sun Microsystems in 1995. There are lots of applications and websites that will not work unless you have Java installed, and more are created every day. Java is fast, secure, and reliable. From laptops to datacenters, game consoles to scientific supercomputers, cell phones to the Internet, Java is everywhere! ...
- Spring
A key element of Spring is infrastructural support at the application level: Spring focuses on the "plumbing" of enterprise applications so that teams can focus on application-level business logic, without unnecessary ties to specific deployment environments. ...
- Spring Boot
Spring Boot makes it easy to create stand-alone, production-grade Spring based Applications that you can "just run". We take an opinionated view of the Spring platform and third-party libraries so you can get started with minimum fuss. Most Spring Boot applications need very little Spring configuration. ...
- Java 8
It is a revolutionary release of the world’s no 1 development platform. It includes a huge upgrade to the Java programming model and a coordinated evolution of the JVM, Java language, and libraries. Java 8 includes features for productivity, ease of use, improved polyglot programming, security and improved performance. ...
- Django
Django is a high-level Python Web framework that encourages rapid development and clean, pragmatic design. ...
- PHP
Fast, flexible and pragmatic, PHP powers everything from your blog to the most popular websites in the world. ...
- JavaScript
JavaScript is most known as the scripting language for Web pages, but used in many non-browser environments as well such as node.js or Apache CouchDB. It is a prototype-based, multi-paradigm scripting language that is dynamic,and supports object-oriented, imperative, and functional programming styles. ...
- Git
Git is a free and open source distributed version control system designed to handle everything from small to very large projects with speed and efficiency. ...
Java EE alternatives & related posts
Java
- Great libraries599
- Widely used445
- Excellent tooling400
- Huge amount of documentation available395
- Large pool of developers available334
- Open source208
- Excellent performance202
- Great development157
- Used for android150
- Vast array of 3rd party libraries148
- Compiled Language60
- Used for Web52
- High Performance46
- Managed memory46
- Native threads44
- Statically typed43
- Easy to read35
- Great Community33
- Reliable platform29
- Sturdy garbage collection24
- JVM compatibility24
- Cross Platform Enterprise Integration22
- Universal platform20
- Good amount of APIs20
- Great Support18
- Great ecosystem14
- Backward compatible11
- Lots of boilerplate11
- Everywhere10
- Excellent SDK - JDK9
- It's Java7
- Cross-platform7
- Static typing7
- Mature language thus stable systems6
- Better than Ruby6
- Long term language6
- Portability6
- Clojure5
- Vast Collections Library5
- Used for Android development5
- Most developers favorite4
- Old tech4
- History3
- Great Structure3
- Stable platform, which many new languages depend on3
- Javadoc3
- Testable3
- Best martial for design3
- Type Safe2
- Faster than python2
- Job0
- Verbosity33
- NullpointerException27
- Nightmare to Write17
- Overcomplexity is praised in community culture16
- Boiler plate code12
- Classpath hell prior to Java 98
- No REPL6
- No property4
- Code are too long3
- Non-intuitive generic implementation2
- There is not optional parameter2
- Floating-point errors2
- Java's too statically, stronglly, and strictly typed1
- Returning Wildcard Types1
- Terrbible compared to Python/Batch Perormence1
related Java posts
How Uber developed the open source, end-to-end distributed tracing Jaeger , now a CNCF project:
Distributed tracing is quickly becoming a must-have component in the tools that organizations use to monitor their complex, microservice-based architectures. At Uber, our open source distributed tracing system Jaeger saw large-scale internal adoption throughout 2016, integrated into hundreds of microservices and now recording thousands of traces every second.
Here is the story of how we got here, from investigating off-the-shelf solutions like Zipkin, to why we switched from pull to push architecture, and how distributed tracing will continue to evolve:
https://eng.uber.com/distributed-tracing/
(GitHub Pages : https://www.jaegertracing.io/, GitHub: https://github.com/jaegertracing/jaeger)
Bindings/Operator: Python Java Node.js Go C++ Kubernetes JavaScript OpenShift C# Apache Spark
When you think about test automation, it’s crucial to make it everyone’s responsibility (not just QA Engineers'). We started with Selenium and Java, but with our platform revolving around Ruby, Elixir and JavaScript, QA Engineers were left alone to automate tests. Cypress was the answer, as we could switch to JS and simply involve more people from day one. There's a downside too, as it meant testing on Chrome only, but that was "good enough" for us + if really needed we can always cover some specific cases in a different way.
Spring
- Java230
- Open source157
- Great community136
- Very powerful123
- Enterprise114
- Lot of great subprojects64
- Easy setup60
- Convention , configuration, done44
- Standard40
- Love the logic31
- Good documentation13
- Dependency injection11
- Stability11
- MVC9
- Easy6
- Makes the hard stuff fun & the easy stuff automatic3
- Strong typing3
- Code maintenance2
- Best practices2
- Maven2
- Great Desgin2
- Easy Integration with Spring Security2
- Integrations with most other Java frameworks2
- Java has more support and more libraries1
- Supports vast databases1
- Large ecosystem with seamless integration1
- OracleDb integration1
- Live project1
- Draws you into its own ecosystem and bloat15
- Verbose configuration3
- Poor documentation3
- Java3
- Java is more verbose language in compare to python2
related Spring posts
Is learning Spring and Spring Boot for web apps back-end development is still relevant in 2021? Feel free to share your views with comparison to Django/Node.js/ ExpressJS or other frameworks.
Please share some good beginner resources to start learning about spring/spring boot framework to build the web apps.
I am consulting for a company that wants to move its current CubeCart e-commerce site to another PHP based platform like PrestaShop or Magento. I was interested in alternatives that utilize Node.js as the primary platform. I currently don't know PHP, but I have done full stack dev with Java, Spring, Thymeleaf, etc.. I am just unsure that learning a set of technologies not commonly used makes sense. For example, in PrestaShop, I would need to work with JavaScript better and learn PHP, Twig, and Bootstrap. It seems more cumbersome than a Node JS system, where the language syntax stays the same for the full stack. I am looking for thoughts and advice on the relevance of PHP skillset into the future AND whether the Node based e-commerce open source options can compete with Magento or Prestashop.
Spring Boot
- Powerful and handy149
- Easy setup134
- Java128
- Spring90
- Fast85
- Extensible46
- Lots of "off the shelf" functionalities37
- Cloud Solid32
- Caches well26
- Productive24
- Many receipes around for obscure features24
- Modular23
- Integrations with most other Java frameworks23
- Spring ecosystem is great22
- Auto-configuration21
- Fast Performance With Microservices21
- Community18
- Easy setup, Community Support, Solid for ERP apps17
- One-stop shop15
- Easy to parallelize14
- Cross-platform14
- Easy setup, good for build erp systems, well documented13
- Powerful 3rd party libraries and frameworks13
- Easy setup, Git Integration12
- It's so easier to start a project on spring5
- Kotlin4
- Microservice and Reactive Programming1
- The ability to integrate with the open source ecosystem1
- Heavy weight23
- Annotation ceremony18
- Java13
- Many config files needed11
- Reactive5
- Excellent tools for cloud hosting, since 5.x4
- Java 😒😒1
related Spring Boot posts
We are in the process of building a modern content platform to deliver our content through various channels. We decided to go with Microservices architecture as we wanted scale. Microservice architecture style is an approach to developing an application as a suite of small independently deployable services built around specific business capabilities. You can gain modularity, extensive parallelism and cost-effective scaling by deploying services across many distributed servers. Microservices modularity facilitates independent updates/deployments, and helps to avoid single point of failure, which can help prevent large-scale outages. We also decided to use Event Driven Architecture pattern which is a popular distributed asynchronous architecture pattern used to produce highly scalable applications. The event-driven architecture is made up of highly decoupled, single-purpose event processing components that asynchronously receive and process events.
To build our #Backend capabilities we decided to use the following: 1. #Microservices - Java with Spring Boot , Node.js with ExpressJS and Python with Flask 2. #Eventsourcingframework - Amazon Kinesis , Amazon Kinesis Firehose , Amazon SNS , Amazon SQS, AWS Lambda 3. #Data - Amazon RDS , Amazon DynamoDB , Amazon S3 , MongoDB Atlas
To build #Webapps we decided to use Angular 2 with RxJS
#Devops - GitHub , Travis CI , Terraform , Docker , Serverless
Is learning Spring and Spring Boot for web apps back-end development is still relevant in 2021? Feel free to share your views with comparison to Django/Node.js/ ExpressJS or other frameworks.
Please share some good beginner resources to start learning about spring/spring boot framework to build the web apps.
related Java 8 posts
- Rapid development670
- Open source487
- Great community424
- Easy to learn379
- Mvc276
- Beautiful code232
- Elegant223
- Free206
- Great packages203
- Great libraries194
- Comes with auth and crud admin panel79
- Restful79
- Powerful78
- Great documentation75
- Great for web71
- Python57
- Great orm43
- Great for api41
- All included32
- Fast29
- Web Apps25
- Easy setup23
- Clean23
- Used by top startups21
- Sexy19
- ORM19
- The Django community15
- Allows for very rapid development with great libraries14
- Convention over configuration14
- King of backend world11
- Full stack10
- Great MVC and templating engine10
- Fast prototyping8
- Mvt8
- Easy to develop end to end AI Models7
- Batteries included7
- Its elegant and practical7
- Have not found anything that it can't do6
- Very quick to get something up and running6
- Cross-Platform6
- Easy Structure , useful inbuilt library5
- Great peformance5
- Zero code burden to change databases5
- Python community5
- Map4
- Just the right level of abstraction4
- Easy to change database manager4
- Modular4
- Many libraries4
- Easy to use4
- Easy4
- Full-Text Search4
- Scaffold3
- Fastapi1
- Built in common security1
- Scalable1
- Great default admin panel1
- Node js1
- Gigante ta1
- Rails0
- Underpowered templating26
- Autoreload restarts whole server22
- Underpowered ORM22
- URL dispatcher ignores HTTP method15
- Internal subcomponents coupling10
- Not nodejs8
- Configuration hell8
- Admin7
- Not as clean and nice documentation like Laravel5
- Python4
- Not typed3
- Bloated admin panel included3
- Overwhelming folder structure2
- InEffective Multithreading2
- Not type safe1
related Django posts
Simple controls over complex technologies, as we put it, wouldn't be possible without neat UIs for our user areas including start page, dashboard, settings, and docs.
Initially, there was Django. Back in 2011, considering our Python-centric approach, that was the best choice. Later, we realized we needed to iterate on our website more quickly. And this led us to detaching Django from our front end. That was when we decided to build an SPA.
For building user interfaces, we're currently using React as it provided the fastest rendering back when we were building our toolkit. It’s worth mentioning Uploadcare is not a front-end-focused SPA: we aren’t running at high levels of complexity. If it were, we’d go with Ember.js.
However, there's a chance we will shift to the faster Preact, with its motto of using as little code as possible, and because it makes more use of browser APIs. One of our future tasks for our front end is to configure our Webpack bundler to split up the code for different site sections. For styles, we use PostCSS along with its plugins such as cssnano which minifies all the code.
All that allows us to provide a great user experience and quickly implement changes where they are needed with as little code as possible.
Hey, so I developed a basic application with Python. But to use it, you need a python interpreter. I want to add a GUI to make it more appealing. What should I choose to develop a GUI? I have very basic skills in front end development (CSS, JavaScript). I am fluent in python. I'm looking for a tool that is easy to use and doesn't require too much code knowledge. I have recently tried out Flask, but it is kinda complicated. Should I stick with it, move to Django, or is there another nice framework to use?
PHP
- Large community951
- Open source817
- Easy deployment765
- Great frameworks487
- The best glue on the web387
- Continual improvements235
- Good old web185
- Web foundation145
- Community packages135
- Tool support125
- Used by wordpress35
- Excellent documentation34
- Used by Facebook29
- Because of Symfony23
- Dynamic Language21
- Cheap hosting17
- Easy to learn16
- Awesome Language and easy to implement14
- Very powerful web language14
- Fast development14
- Composer13
- Flexibility, syntax, extensibility12
- Because of Laravel12
- Easiest deployment9
- Readable Code8
- Fast8
- Most of the web uses it7
- Worst popularity quality ratio7
- Short development lead times7
- Fastestest Time to Version 1.0 Deployments7
- Faster then ever6
- Open source and large community5
- Simple, flexible yet Scalable5
- I have no choice :(4
- Has the best ecommerce(Magento,Prestashop,Opencart,etc)4
- Is like one zip of air4
- Open source and great framework4
- Large community, easy setup, easy deployment, framework4
- Great developer experience4
- Easy to use and learn4
- Cheap to own4
- Easy to learn, a big community, lot of frameworks4
- Walk away2
- Used by STOMT2
- Hard not to use2
- Fault tolerance2
- Great flexibility. From fast prototyping to large apps2
- Interpreted at the run time2
- FFI2
- Safe the planet2
- It can get you a lamborghini1
- Secure1
- Simplesaml1
- Bando1
- Secure0
- So easy to learn, good practices are hard to find22
- Inconsistent API16
- Fragmented community8
- Not secure6
- No routing system3
- Hard to debug3
- Old2
related PHP posts
When I joined NYT there was already broad dissatisfaction with the LAMP (Linux Apache HTTP Server MySQL PHP) Stack and the front end framework, in particular. So, I wasn't passing judgment on it. I mean, LAMP's fine, you can do good work in LAMP. It's a little dated at this point, but it's not ... I didn't want to rip it out for its own sake, but everyone else was like, "We don't like this, it's really inflexible." And I remember from being outside the company when that was called MIT FIVE when it had launched. And been observing it from the outside, and I was like, you guys took so long to do that and you did it so carefully, and yet you're not happy with your decisions. Why is that? That was more the impetus. If we're going to do this again, how are we going to do it in a way that we're gonna get a better result?
So we're moving quickly away from LAMP, I would say. So, right now, the new front end is React based and using Apollo. And we've been in a long, protracted, gradual rollout of the core experiences.
React is now talking to GraphQL as a primary API. There's a Node.js back end, to the front end, which is mainly for server-side rendering, as well.
Behind there, the main repository for the GraphQL server is a big table repository, that we call Bodega because it's a convenience store. And that reads off of a Kafka pipeline.
Our whole Node.js backend stack consists of the following tools:
- Lerna as a tool for multi package and multi repository management
- npm as package manager
- NestJS as Node.js framework
- TypeScript as programming language
- ExpressJS as web server
- Swagger UI for visualizing and interacting with the API’s resources
- Postman as a tool for API development
- TypeORM as object relational mapping layer
- JSON Web Token for access token management
The main reason we have chosen Node.js over PHP is related to the following artifacts:
- Made for the web and widely in use: Node.js is a software platform for developing server-side network services. Well-known projects that rely on Node.js include the blogging software Ghost, the project management tool Trello and the operating system WebOS. Node.js requires the JavaScript runtime environment V8, which was specially developed by Google for the popular Chrome browser. This guarantees a very resource-saving architecture, which qualifies Node.js especially for the operation of a web server. Ryan Dahl, the developer of Node.js, released the first stable version on May 27, 2009. He developed Node.js out of dissatisfaction with the possibilities that JavaScript offered at the time. The basic functionality of Node.js has been mapped with JavaScript since the first version, which can be expanded with a large number of different modules. The current package managers (npm or Yarn) for Node.js know more than 1,000,000 of these modules.
- Fast server-side solutions: Node.js adopts the JavaScript "event-loop" to create non-blocking I/O applications that conveniently serve simultaneous events. With the standard available asynchronous processing within JavaScript/TypeScript, highly scalable, server-side solutions can be realized. The efficient use of the CPU and the RAM is maximized and more simultaneous requests can be processed than with conventional multi-thread servers.
- A language along the entire stack: Widely used frameworks such as React or AngularJS or Vue.js, which we prefer, are written in JavaScript/TypeScript. If Node.js is now used on the server side, you can use all the advantages of a uniform script language throughout the entire application development. The same language in the back- and frontend simplifies the maintenance of the application and also the coordination within the development team.
- Flexibility: Node.js sets very few strict dependencies, rules and guidelines and thus grants a high degree of flexibility in application development. There are no strict conventions so that the appropriate architecture, design structures, modules and features can be freely selected for the development.
JavaScript
- Can be used on frontend/backend1.7K
- It's everywhere1.5K
- Lots of great frameworks1.2K
- Fast896
- Light weight745
- Flexible425
- You can't get a device today that doesn't run js392
- Non-blocking i/o286
- Ubiquitousness236
- Expressive191
- Extended functionality to web pages55
- Relatively easy language49
- Executed on the client side46
- Relatively fast to the end user30
- Pure Javascript25
- Functional programming21
- Async15
- Full-stack13
- Setup is easy12
- Its everywhere12
- JavaScript is the New PHP11
- Because I love functions11
- Like it or not, JS is part of the web standard10
- Can be used in backend, frontend and DB9
- Expansive community9
- Future Language of The Web9
- Easy9
- No need to use PHP8
- For the good parts8
- Can be used both as frontend and backend as well8
- Everyone use it8
- Most Popular Language in the World8
- Easy to hire developers8
- Love-hate relationship7
- Powerful7
- Photoshop has 3 JS runtimes built in7
- Evolution of C7
- Popularized Class-Less Architecture & Lambdas7
- Agile, packages simple to use7
- Supports lambdas and closures7
- 1.6K Can be used on frontend/backend6
- It's fun6
- Hard not to use6
- Nice6
- Client side JS uses the visitors CPU to save Server Res6
- Versitile6
- It let's me use Babel & Typescript6
- Easy to make something6
- Its fun and fast6
- Can be used on frontend/backend/Mobile/create PRO Ui6
- Function expressions are useful for callbacks5
- What to add5
- Client processing5
- Everywhere5
- Scope manipulation5
- Stockholm Syndrome5
- Promise relationship5
- Clojurescript5
- Because it is so simple and lightweight4
- Only Programming language on browser4
- Hard to learn1
- Test1
- Test21
- Easy to understand1
- Not the best1
- Easy to learn1
- Subskill #41
- Hard 彤0
- A constant moving target, too much churn22
- Horribly inconsistent20
- Javascript is the New PHP15
- No ability to monitor memory utilitization9
- Shows Zero output in case of ANY error8
- Thinks strange results are better than errors7
- Can be ugly6
- No GitHub3
- Slow2
related JavaScript posts
Oof. I have truly hated JavaScript for a long time. Like, for over twenty years now. Like, since the Clinton administration. It's always been a nightmare to deal with all of the aspects of that silly language.
But wowza, things have changed. Tooling is just way, way better. I'm primarily web-oriented, and using React and Apollo together the past few years really opened my eyes to building rich apps. And I deeply apologize for using the phrase rich apps; I don't think I've ever said such Enterprisey words before.
But yeah, things are different now. I still love Rails, and still use it for a lot of apps I build. But it's that silly rich apps phrase that's the problem. Users have way more comprehensive expectations than they did even five years ago, and the JS community does a good job at building tools and tech that tackle the problems of making heavy, complicated UI and frontend work.
Obviously there's a lot of things happening here, so just saying "JavaScript isn't terrible" might encompass a huge amount of libraries and frameworks. But if you're like me, yeah, give things another shot- I'm somehow not hating on JavaScript anymore and... gulp... I kinda love it.
How Uber developed the open source, end-to-end distributed tracing Jaeger , now a CNCF project:
Distributed tracing is quickly becoming a must-have component in the tools that organizations use to monitor their complex, microservice-based architectures. At Uber, our open source distributed tracing system Jaeger saw large-scale internal adoption throughout 2016, integrated into hundreds of microservices and now recording thousands of traces every second.
Here is the story of how we got here, from investigating off-the-shelf solutions like Zipkin, to why we switched from pull to push architecture, and how distributed tracing will continue to evolve:
https://eng.uber.com/distributed-tracing/
(GitHub Pages : https://www.jaegertracing.io/, GitHub: https://github.com/jaegertracing/jaeger)
Bindings/Operator: Python Java Node.js Go C++ Kubernetes JavaScript OpenShift C# Apache Spark
- Distributed version control system1.4K
- Efficient branching and merging1.1K
- Fast959
- Open source845
- Better than svn726
- Great command-line application368
- Simple306
- Free291
- Easy to use232
- Does not require server222
- Distributed27
- Small & Fast22
- Feature based workflow18
- Staging Area15
- Most wide-spread VSC13
- Role-based codelines11
- Disposable Experimentation11
- Frictionless Context Switching7
- Data Assurance6
- Efficient5
- Just awesome4
- Github integration3
- Easy branching and merging3
- Compatible2
- Flexible2
- Possible to lose history and commits2
- Rebase supported natively; reflog; access to plumbing1
- Light1
- Team Integration1
- Fast, scalable, distributed revision control system1
- Easy1
- Flexible, easy, Safe, and fast1
- CLI is great, but the GUI tools are awesome1
- It's what you do1
- Phinx0
- Hard to learn16
- Inconsistent command line interface11
- Easy to lose uncommitted work9
- Worst documentation ever possibly made7
- Awful merge handling5
- Unexistent preventive security flows3
- Rebase hell3
- When --force is disabled, cannot rebase2
- Ironically even die-hard supporters screw up badly2
- Doesn't scale for big data1
related Git posts
Our whole DevOps stack consists of the following tools:
- GitHub (incl. GitHub Pages/Markdown for Documentation, GettingStarted and HowTo's) for collaborative review and code management tool
- Respectively Git as revision control system
- SourceTree as Git GUI
- Visual Studio Code as IDE
- CircleCI for continuous integration (automatize development process)
- Prettier / TSLint / ESLint as code linter
- SonarQube as quality gate
- Docker as container management (incl. Docker Compose for multi-container application management)
- VirtualBox for operating system simulation tests
- Kubernetes as cluster management for docker containers
- Heroku for deploying in test environments
- nginx as web server (preferably used as facade server in production environment)
- SSLMate (using OpenSSL) for certificate management
- Amazon EC2 (incl. Amazon S3) for deploying in stage (production-like) and production environments
- PostgreSQL as preferred database system
- Redis as preferred in-memory database/store (great for caching)
The main reason we have chosen Kubernetes over Docker Swarm is related to the following artifacts:
- Key features: Easy and flexible installation, Clear dashboard, Great scaling operations, Monitoring is an integral part, Great load balancing concepts, Monitors the condition and ensures compensation in the event of failure.
- Applications: An application can be deployed using a combination of pods, deployments, and services (or micro-services).
- Functionality: Kubernetes as a complex installation and setup process, but it not as limited as Docker Swarm.
- Monitoring: It supports multiple versions of logging and monitoring when the services are deployed within the cluster (Elasticsearch/Kibana (ELK), Heapster/Grafana, Sysdig cloud integration).
- Scalability: All-in-one framework for distributed systems.
- Other Benefits: Kubernetes is backed by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), huge community among container orchestration tools, it is an open source and modular tool that works with any OS.
Often enough I have to explain my way of going about setting up a CI/CD pipeline with multiple deployment platforms. Since I am a bit tired of yapping the same every single time, I've decided to write it up and share with the world this way, and send people to read it instead ;). I will explain it on "live-example" of how the Rome got built, basing that current methodology exists only of readme.md and wishes of good luck (as it usually is ;)).
It always starts with an app, whatever it may be and reading the readmes available while Vagrant and VirtualBox is installing and updating. Following that is the first hurdle to go over - convert all the instruction/scripts into Ansible playbook(s), and only stopping when doing a clear vagrant up
or vagrant reload
we will have a fully working environment. As our Vagrant environment is now functional, it's time to break it! This is the moment to look for how things can be done better (too rigid/too lose versioning? Sloppy environment setup?) and replace them with the right way to do stuff, one that won't bite us in the backside. This is the point, and the best opportunity, to upcycle the existing way of doing dev environment to produce a proper, production-grade product.
I should probably digress here for a moment and explain why. I firmly believe that the way you deploy production is the same way you should deploy develop, shy of few debugging-friendly setting. This way you avoid the discrepancy between how production work vs how development works, which almost always causes major pains in the back of the neck, and with use of proper tools should mean no more work for the developers. That's why we start with Vagrant as developer boxes should be as easy as vagrant up
, but the meat of our product lies in Ansible which will do meat of the work and can be applied to almost anything: AWS, bare metal, docker, LXC, in open net, behind vpn - you name it.
We must also give proper consideration to monitoring and logging hoovering at this point. My generic answer here is to grab Elasticsearch, Kibana, and Logstash. While for different use cases there may be better solutions, this one is well battle-tested, performs reasonably and is very easy to scale both vertically (within some limits) and horizontally. Logstash rules are easy to write and are well supported in maintenance through Ansible, which as I've mentioned earlier, are at the very core of things, and creating triggers/reports and alerts based on Elastic and Kibana is generally a breeze, including some quite complex aggregations.
If we are happy with the state of the Ansible it's time to move on and put all those roles and playbooks to work. Namely, we need something to manage our CI/CD pipelines. For me, the choice is obvious: TeamCity. It's modern, robust and unlike most of the light-weight alternatives, it's transparent. What I mean by that is that it doesn't tell you how to do things, doesn't limit your ways to deploy, or test, or package for that matter. Instead, it provides a developer-friendly and rich playground for your pipelines. You can do most the same with Jenkins, but it has a quite dated look and feel to it, while also missing some key functionality that must be brought in via plugins (like quality REST API which comes built-in with TeamCity). It also comes with all the common-handy plugins like Slack or Apache Maven integration.
The exact flow between CI and CD varies too greatly from one application to another to describe, so I will outline a few rules that guide me in it: 1. Make build steps as small as possible. This way when something breaks, we know exactly where, without needing to dig and root around. 2. All security credentials besides development environment must be sources from individual Vault instances. Keys to those containers should exist only on the CI/CD box and accessible by a few people (the less the better). This is pretty self-explanatory, as anything besides dev may contain sensitive data and, at times, be public-facing. Because of that appropriate security must be present. TeamCity shines in this department with excellent secrets-management. 3. Every part of the build chain shall consume and produce artifacts. If it creates nothing, it likely shouldn't be its own build. This way if any issue shows up with any environment or version, all developer has to do it is grab appropriate artifacts to reproduce the issue locally. 4. Deployment builds should be directly tied to specific Git branches/tags. This enables much easier tracking of what caused an issue, including automated identifying and tagging the author (nothing like automated regression testing!).
Speaking of deployments, I generally try to keep it simple but also with a close eye on the wallet. Because of that, I am more than happy with AWS or another cloud provider, but also constantly peeking at the loads and do we get the value of what we are paying for. Often enough the pattern of use is not constantly erratic, but rather has a firm baseline which could be migrated away from the cloud and into bare metal boxes. That is another part where this approach strongly triumphs over the common Docker and CircleCI setup, where you are very much tied in to use cloud providers and getting out is expensive. Here to embrace bare-metal hosting all you need is a help of some container-based self-hosting software, my personal preference is with Proxmox and LXC. Following that all you must write are ansible scripts to manage hardware of Proxmox, similar way as you do for Amazon EC2 (ansible supports both greatly) and you are good to go. One does not exclude another, quite the opposite, as they can live in great synergy and cut your costs dramatically (the heavier your base load, the bigger the savings) while providing production-grade resiliency.