Alternatives to Playwright logo

Alternatives to Playwright

Puppeteer, Selenium, Protractor, Cypress, and TestCafe are the most popular alternatives and competitors to Playwright.
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What is Playwright and what are its top alternatives?

It is a Node library to automate the Chromium, WebKit and Firefox browsers with a single API. It enables cross-browser web automation that is ever-green, capable, reliable and fast.
Playwright is a tool in the Browser Testing category of a tech stack.
Playwright is an open source tool with 62K GitHub stars and 3.3K GitHub forks. Here’s a link to Playwright's open source repository on GitHub

Top Alternatives to Playwright

  • Puppeteer
    Puppeteer

    Puppeteer is a Node library which provides a high-level API to control headless Chrome over the DevTools Protocol. It can also be configured to use full (non-headless) Chrome. ...

  • Selenium
    Selenium

    Selenium automates browsers. That's it! What you do with that power is entirely up to you. Primarily, it is for automating web applications for testing purposes, but is certainly not limited to just that. Boring web-based administration tasks can (and should!) also be automated as well. ...

  • Protractor
    Protractor

    Protractor is an end-to-end test framework for Angular and AngularJS applications. Protractor runs tests against your application running in a real browser, interacting with it as a user would. ...

  • Cypress
    Cypress

    Cypress is a front end automated testing application created for the modern web. Cypress is built on a new architecture and runs in the same run-loop as the application being tested. As a result Cypress provides better, faster, and more reliable testing for anything that runs in a browser. Cypress works on any front-end framework or website. ...

  • TestCafe
    TestCafe

    It is a pure node.js end-to-end solution for testing web apps. It takes care of all the stages: starting browsers, running tests, gathering test results and generating reports. ...

  • WebdriverIO
    WebdriverIO

    WebdriverIO lets you control a browser or a mobile application with just a few lines of code. Your test code will look simple, concise and easy to read. ...

  • JavaScript
    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

    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. ...

Playwright alternatives & related posts

Puppeteer logo

Puppeteer

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569
26
Headless Chrome Node API
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569
+ 1
26
PROS OF PUPPETEER
  • 10
    Very well documented
  • 10
    Scriptable web browser
  • 6
    Promise based
CONS OF PUPPETEER
  • 10
    Chrome only

related Puppeteer posts

Raziel Alron
Automation Engineer at Tipalti · | 7 upvotes · 2M views

Currently, we are using Protractor in our project. Since Protractor isn't updated anymore, we are looking for a new tool. The strongest suggestions are WebdriverIO or Puppeteer. Please help me figure out what tool would make the transition fastest and easiest. Please note that Protractor uses its own locator system, and we want the switch to be as simple as possible. Thank you!

See more
Dave Willenberg
Founding Director at Detroit Technical English · | 7 upvotes · 33.9K views
HTML Templates: a Pain in the Backend

We chose Pug because writing raw HTML is about as enjoyable as a fart in a spacesuit, and writing decently-rendering HTML for enterprise email clients is a soul-sucking type of black magic.

Pug takes HTML as a (...markdown) language out of the stack by using a simple, sane syntax to represent HTML in just JavaScript©. Piecing together what you need from any number of standalone - including functional - components is both delightfully easy, and easy to maintain.

All you're really writing are exportable JavaScript functions that take a single Object parameter - once that concept takes hold, you'll quickly swear off angle brackets in favor of neatly indented and extensible e-mail, invoice, and reporting templates.

There's a jstransformer filter for instant interop with just about every preprocessor ( Stylus , in our case) and file format out there. Pass that compiled HTML though Juice on Node.js and bam - rugged HTML-emails that hold up in even the wonkiest Lotus Notes clients.

That the end result is 'just HTML' is the final cherry on top. Debugging needs only DevTools, and Puppeteer 's now all you need to create fancy-pants PDFs to your heart's content.

See more
Selenium logo

Selenium

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12.3K
525
Web Browser Automation
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PROS OF SELENIUM
  • 175
    Automates browsers
  • 154
    Testing
  • 101
    Essential tool for running test automation
  • 24
    Record-Playback
  • 24
    Remote Control
  • 8
    Data crawling
  • 7
    Supports end to end testing
  • 6
    Easy set up
  • 6
    Functional testing
  • 4
    The Most flexible monitoring system
  • 3
    End to End Testing
  • 3
    Easy to integrate with build tools
  • 2
    Comparing the performance selenium is faster than jasm
  • 2
    Record and playback
  • 2
    Compatible with Python
  • 2
    Easy to scale
  • 2
    Integration Tests
  • 0
    Integrated into Selenium-Jupiter framework
CONS OF SELENIUM
  • 8
    Flaky tests
  • 4
    Slow as needs to make browser (even with no gui)
  • 2
    Update browser drivers

related Selenium posts

Kamil Kowalski
Lead Architect at Fresha · | 28 upvotes · 3.9M views

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.

See more
Benjamin Poon
QA Manager - Engineering at HBC Digital · | 8 upvotes · 1.9M views

For our digital QA organization to support a complex hybrid monolith/microservice architecture, our team took on the lofty goal of building out a commonized UI test automation framework. One of the primary requisites included a technical minimalist threshold such that an engineer or analyst with fundamental knowledge of JavaScript could automate their tests with greater ease. Just to list a few: - Nightwatchjs - Selenium - Cucumber - GitHub - Go.CD - Docker - ExpressJS - React - PostgreSQL

With this structure, we're able to combine the automation efforts of each team member into a centralized repository while also providing new relevant metrics to business owners.

See more
Protractor logo

Protractor

1K
543
33
End-to-end test framework for Angular and AngularJS applications
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PROS OF PROTRACTOR
  • 9
    Easy setup
  • 8
    Quick tests implementation
  • 6
    Flexible
  • 5
    Open source
  • 5
    Promise support
CONS OF PROTRACTOR
  • 4
    Limited

related Protractor posts

Raziel Alron
Automation Engineer at Tipalti · | 7 upvotes · 2M views

Currently, we are using Protractor in our project. Since Protractor isn't updated anymore, we are looking for a new tool. The strongest suggestions are WebdriverIO or Puppeteer. Please help me figure out what tool would make the transition fastest and easiest. Please note that Protractor uses its own locator system, and we want the switch to be as simple as possible. Thank you!

See more
Sai Chaitanya Mankala
Tech Lead at KIOT Innovations · | 6 upvotes · 862.9K views

Protractor or Cypress for ionic-angular?

We have a huge ionic-angular app with almost 100 pages and 10+ injectables. There are no tests written yet. Before we start, we need some suggestions about the framework. Would you suggest Cypress or Angular's Protractor with Jasmine / Karma for a heavy ionic app with Angular?

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Cypress logo

Cypress

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2K
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When testing is easy, developers build better things faster and with confidence.
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PROS OF CYPRESS
  • 29
    Open source
  • 22
    Great documentation
  • 20
    Simple usage
  • 18
    Fast
  • 10
    Cross Browser testing
  • 9
    Easy us with CI
  • 5
    Npm install cypress only
  • 1
    Good for beginner automation engineers
CONS OF CYPRESS
  • 21
    Cypress is weak at cross-browser testing
  • 14
    Switch tabs : Cypress can'nt support
  • 12
    No iFrame support
  • 9
    No page object support
  • 9
    No multiple domain support
  • 8
    No file upload support
  • 8
    No support for multiple tab control
  • 8
    No xPath support
  • 7
    No support for Safari
  • 7
    Cypress doesn't support native app
  • 7
    Re-run failed tests retries not supported yet
  • 7
    No support for multiple browser control
  • 5
    $20/user/thread for reports
  • 4
    Adobe
  • 4
    Using a non-standard automation protocol
  • 4
    Not freeware
  • 3
    No 'WD wire protocol' support

related Cypress posts

Kamil Kowalski
Lead Architect at Fresha · | 28 upvotes · 3.9M views

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.

See more
Robert Zuber

We are in the process of adopting Next.js as our React framework and using Storybook to help build our React components in isolation. This new part of our frontend is written in TypeScript, and we use Emotion for CSS/styling. For delivering data, we use GraphQL and Apollo. Jest, Percy, and Cypress are used for testing.

See more
TestCafe logo

TestCafe

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A Node.js tool to automate end-to-end web testing
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PROS OF TESTCAFE
  • 8
    Cross-browser testing
  • 4
    Open source
  • 4
    Easy setup/installation
  • 4
    Built in waits
  • 3
    UI End to End testing
  • 2
    Supports Devices without extra software/package
  • 1
    Both client and server side debug
CONS OF TESTCAFE
  • 9
    No longer free

related TestCafe posts

What tools will be a good fit for the AngularJS application? I am experienced in Selenium WebDriver with Java. Any suggestion for Selenium or TestCafe?

See more
WebdriverIO logo

WebdriverIO

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Webdriver/Selenium 2.0 JavaScript bindings for Node.js
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PROS OF WEBDRIVERIO
  • 11
    Various integrations to vendors like Sauce Labs
  • 10
    Open Source
  • 8
    Great community
  • 7
    Easy to setup
  • 4
    Best solution for broad browser support
CONS OF WEBDRIVERIO
  • 8
    High maintenance

related WebdriverIO posts

Raziel Alron
Automation Engineer at Tipalti · | 7 upvotes · 2M views

Currently, we are using Protractor in our project. Since Protractor isn't updated anymore, we are looking for a new tool. The strongest suggestions are WebdriverIO or Puppeteer. Please help me figure out what tool would make the transition fastest and easiest. Please note that Protractor uses its own locator system, and we want the switch to be as simple as possible. Thank you!

See more
Kevin Roulleau
QA Engineer Freelance at happn · | 5 upvotes · 990K views

I chose WebdriverIO and Appium to implement a E2E tests solution on a native mobile app. WebdriverIO goes well beyond just implementing the Selenium / Appium protocol and allows to run tests in parallel out of the box. Appium has the big advantage of supporting iOS and Android platforms, so the test codebase and tools are exactly the same, which greatly reduces the learning curve and implementation time.

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JavaScript logo

JavaScript

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Lightweight, interpreted, object-oriented language with first-class functions
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PROS OF JAVASCRIPT
  • 1.7K
    Can be used on frontend/backend
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    It's everywhere
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    Lots of great frameworks
  • 896
    Fast
  • 745
    Light weight
  • 425
    Flexible
  • 392
    You can't get a device today that doesn't run js
  • 286
    Non-blocking i/o
  • 236
    Ubiquitousness
  • 191
    Expressive
  • 55
    Extended functionality to web pages
  • 49
    Relatively easy language
  • 46
    Executed on the client side
  • 30
    Relatively fast to the end user
  • 25
    Pure Javascript
  • 21
    Functional programming
  • 15
    Async
  • 13
    Full-stack
  • 12
    Setup is easy
  • 12
    Its everywhere
  • 11
    JavaScript is the New PHP
  • 11
    Because I love functions
  • 10
    Like it or not, JS is part of the web standard
  • 9
    Can be used in backend, frontend and DB
  • 9
    Expansive community
  • 9
    Future Language of The Web
  • 9
    Easy
  • 8
    No need to use PHP
  • 8
    For the good parts
  • 8
    Can be used both as frontend and backend as well
  • 8
    Everyone use it
  • 8
    Most Popular Language in the World
  • 8
    Easy to hire developers
  • 7
    Love-hate relationship
  • 7
    Powerful
  • 7
    Photoshop has 3 JS runtimes built in
  • 7
    Evolution of C
  • 7
    Popularized Class-Less Architecture & Lambdas
  • 7
    Agile, packages simple to use
  • 7
    Supports lambdas and closures
  • 6
    1.6K Can be used on frontend/backend
  • 6
    It's fun
  • 6
    Hard not to use
  • 6
    Nice
  • 6
    Client side JS uses the visitors CPU to save Server Res
  • 6
    Versitile
  • 6
    It let's me use Babel & Typescript
  • 6
    Easy to make something
  • 6
    Its fun and fast
  • 6
    Can be used on frontend/backend/Mobile/create PRO Ui
  • 5
    Function expressions are useful for callbacks
  • 5
    What to add
  • 5
    Client processing
  • 5
    Everywhere
  • 5
    Scope manipulation
  • 5
    Stockholm Syndrome
  • 5
    Promise relationship
  • 5
    Clojurescript
  • 4
    Because it is so simple and lightweight
  • 4
    Only Programming language on browser
  • 1
    Hard to learn
  • 1
    Test
  • 1
    Test2
  • 1
    Easy to understand
  • 1
    Not the best
  • 1
    Easy to learn
  • 1
    Subskill #4
  • 0
    Hard 彤
CONS OF JAVASCRIPT
  • 22
    A constant moving target, too much churn
  • 20
    Horribly inconsistent
  • 15
    Javascript is the New PHP
  • 9
    No ability to monitor memory utilitization
  • 8
    Shows Zero output in case of ANY error
  • 7
    Thinks strange results are better than errors
  • 6
    Can be ugly
  • 3
    No GitHub
  • 2
    Slow

related JavaScript posts

Zach Holman

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.

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Conor Myhrvold
Tech Brand Mgr, Office of CTO at Uber · | 44 upvotes · 9.7M views

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

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Git logo

Git

289.2K
173.8K
6.6K
Fast, scalable, distributed revision control system
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PROS OF GIT
  • 1.4K
    Distributed version control system
  • 1.1K
    Efficient branching and merging
  • 959
    Fast
  • 845
    Open source
  • 726
    Better than svn
  • 368
    Great command-line application
  • 306
    Simple
  • 291
    Free
  • 232
    Easy to use
  • 222
    Does not require server
  • 27
    Distributed
  • 22
    Small & Fast
  • 18
    Feature based workflow
  • 15
    Staging Area
  • 13
    Most wide-spread VSC
  • 11
    Role-based codelines
  • 11
    Disposable Experimentation
  • 7
    Frictionless Context Switching
  • 6
    Data Assurance
  • 5
    Efficient
  • 4
    Just awesome
  • 3
    Github integration
  • 3
    Easy branching and merging
  • 2
    Compatible
  • 2
    Flexible
  • 2
    Possible to lose history and commits
  • 1
    Rebase supported natively; reflog; access to plumbing
  • 1
    Light
  • 1
    Team Integration
  • 1
    Fast, scalable, distributed revision control system
  • 1
    Easy
  • 1
    Flexible, easy, Safe, and fast
  • 1
    CLI is great, but the GUI tools are awesome
  • 1
    It's what you do
  • 0
    Phinx
CONS OF GIT
  • 16
    Hard to learn
  • 11
    Inconsistent command line interface
  • 9
    Easy to lose uncommitted work
  • 7
    Worst documentation ever possibly made
  • 5
    Awful merge handling
  • 3
    Unexistent preventive security flows
  • 3
    Rebase hell
  • 2
    When --force is disabled, cannot rebase
  • 2
    Ironically even die-hard supporters screw up badly
  • 1
    Doesn't scale for big data

related Git posts

Simon Reymann
Senior Fullstack Developer at QUANTUSflow Software GmbH · | 30 upvotes · 9M views

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.
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Tymoteusz Paul
Devops guy at X20X Development LTD · | 23 upvotes · 8.1M views

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.

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