Alternatives to Shippo logo

Alternatives to Shippo

ShipStation, EasyPost, Shopify, Postman, and Postman are the most popular alternatives and competitors to Shippo.
18
53
+ 1
0

What is Shippo and what are its top alternatives?

Shippo is a cloud-based shipping platform that helps businesses manage their shipping operations by providing a centralized dashboard to print labels, track shipments, and manage orders. Its key features include multi-carrier support, rate comparison, label printing, order tracking, and batch shipping. However, some limitations of Shippo include limited carrier integrations, occasional glitches in the user interface, and higher pricing compared to some alternatives.

  1. ShipStation: ShipStation is a popular shipping software that offers features like label printing, automation rules, and customer communication tools. Pros include a user-friendly interface and multiple carrier integrations, while cons include higher pricing for larger businesses.

  2. Easyship: Easyship is a shipping solution that provides access to a network of couriers for worldwide deliveries. Key features include transparent pricing, real-time shipping rates, and customizable shipping options. Pros include a wide range of carrier options and a user-friendly interface, while cons include limited automation capabilities.

  3. ShipBob: ShipBob is a fulfillment service that helps businesses with inventory management, order fulfillment, and shipping solutions. Features include fast shipping times, multiple fulfillment centers, and advanced reporting tools. Pros include easy integration with e-commerce platforms and transparent pricing, while cons include higher costs for smaller businesses.

  4. Pirate Ship: Pirate Ship is a free shipping software designed for small businesses and entrepreneurs. It offers features like batch label printing, discounted USPS rates, and shipment tracking. Pros include low costs for shipping labels and simple interface, while cons include limited carrier options.

  5. ShippingEasy: ShippingEasy is a shipping solution that integrates with e-commerce platforms to streamline order fulfillment processes. Key features include order management, label printing, and customer communication tools. Pros include advanced reporting capabilities and automation features, while cons include occasional technical glitches.

  6. Ordoro: Ordoro is a shipping and inventory management software that helps businesses streamline their e-commerce operations. Features include order management, inventory syncing, and shipping label printing. Pros include multi-channel integration and customizable workflows, while cons include limited carrier options.

  7. Fishbowl ShipExpress: Fishbowl ShipExpress is a shipping software that integrates with Fishbowl Inventory to provide shipping solutions for businesses. Key features include rate shopping, label printing, and order tracking. Pros include seamless integration with Fishbowl Inventory and customer support, while cons include limited carrier integrations.

  8. Shiptheory: Shiptheory is a shipping automation platform that helps businesses connect their e-commerce stores with multiple carriers for efficient shipping. Features include order syncing, label printing, and real-time shipping rates. Pros include automation capabilities and scalability, while cons include higher pricing for larger businesses.

  9. Zenstores: Zenstores is a shipping software that integrates with various e-commerce platforms to streamline order fulfillment processes. Key features include label printing, order management, and tracking capabilities. Pros include user-friendly interface and customizable workflows, while cons include limited carrier options.

  10. Stamps.com: Stamps.com is a popular shipping software that offers features like label printing, discounted postage rates, and package tracking. Pros include a wide range of carrier options and integration with e-commerce platforms, while cons include higher pricing for additional services.

Top Alternatives to Shippo

  • ShipStation
    ShipStation

    ShipStation is a web-based software designed to help eCommerce retailers process, fulfill, and ship their orders from all the most popular marketplaces and shopping carts using all the top carriers. ...

  • EasyPost
    EasyPost

    Add shipping APIs to your application in minutes instead of weeks. Get the best shipping rates by unlocking every major carrier in one simple integration. ...

  • Shopify
    Shopify

    Shopify powers tens of thousands of online retailers including General Electric, Amnesty International, CrossFit, Tesla Motors, Encyclopaedia Britannica, Foo Fighters, GitHub, and more. Our platform allows users to easily and quickly create their own online store without all the technical work involved in developing their own website, or the huge expense of having someone else build it. Shopify lets merchants manage all aspects of their shops: uploading products, changing the design, accepting credit card orders, and viewing their incoming orders and completed transactions. ...

  • Postman
    Postman

    It is the only complete API development environment, used by nearly five million developers and more than 100,000 companies worldwide. ...

  • Postman
    Postman

    It is the only complete API development environment, used by nearly five million developers and more than 100,000 companies worldwide. ...

  • Stack Overflow
    Stack Overflow

    Stack Overflow is a question and answer site for professional and enthusiast programmers. It's built and run by you as part of the Stack Exchange network of Q&A sites. With your help, we're working together to build a library of detailed answers to every question about programming. ...

  • Google Maps
    Google Maps

    Create rich applications and stunning visualisations of your data, leveraging the comprehensiveness, accuracy, and usability of Google Maps and a modern web platform that scales as you grow. ...

  • Elasticsearch
    Elasticsearch

    Elasticsearch is a distributed, RESTful search and analytics engine capable of storing data and searching it in near real time. Elasticsearch, Kibana, Beats and Logstash are the Elastic Stack (sometimes called the ELK Stack). ...

Shippo alternatives & related posts

ShipStation logo

ShipStation

24
0
Import, manage and ship your orders with ShipStation... the #1 choice of online sellers.
24
0
PROS OF SHIPSTATION
    Be the first to leave a pro
    CONS OF SHIPSTATION
      Be the first to leave a con

      related ShipStation posts

      EasyPost logo

      EasyPost

      25
      6
      Shipping for developers
      25
      6
      PROS OF EASYPOST
      • 4
        Low cost shipping
      • 1
        Easy to Integrate with
      • 1
        EasyPost Smart Rate provides Time in Transit data
      CONS OF EASYPOST
        Be the first to leave a con

        related EasyPost posts

        Shopify logo

        Shopify

        12.3K
        76
        Quickly and easily create a beautiful online store with Shopify.
        12.3K
        76
        PROS OF SHOPIFY
        • 23
          Affordable yet comprehensive
        • 14
          Great API & integration options
        • 11
          Business-friendly
        • 10
          Intuitive interface
        • 9
          Quick
        • 3
          Liquid
        • 3
          Awesome customer support
        • 2
          POS & Mobile
        • 1
          Dummy Proof
        • 0
          Nopcommerce
        CONS OF SHOPIFY
        • 1
          User is stuck with building a site from a template

        related Shopify posts

        Simon Block
        Founder at Der Mainbauer · | 9 upvotes · 87.3K views

        Hi folks

        We want to move on from Shopify to a headless commerce system. We want to be able to manage multiple storefronts and integrate alternative order solutions like Whats App and social commerce etc. Same time we want to avoid full blown systems with a lot of unnecessary weight. My idea for the stack, so far:

        • Spree Commerce (Shop System),
        • Bloomreach (CMS),
        • Vue Storefront (Frontend)

        I will have to integrate billing solution (like Invoice Ninja), LexOffice for accounting, Optimoroute for the salesman problem, and some more. So flexibility and "easy expandability" is a core demand. Having said that I came across Medusa. It looks promising and seems to check all the boxes. Any thoughts? Basically, it's a decision between Ruby and JavaScript, is it? Can you name me pros and cons of one or both of the systems? What are the serious challenges that I will face going down either one of the roads? Is there another solution that you would highly recommend?

        I've linked our shop, currently running with Shopify.

        Thanks

        See more
        Deal Salt
        Shared insights
        on
        WordPressWordPressShopifyShopify

        Currently, I am using Shopify, and it's working fine somehow. I need to check the access and error logs I am able to do it. That's why thinking set up a WordPress instance on my server. I need a suggestion whether it is good or not. My current website is www.dealsalt.com, please advise.

        Thanks DealSalt

        See more
        Postman logo

        Postman

        95K
        1.8K
        Only complete API development environment
        95K
        1.8K
        PROS OF POSTMAN
        • 490
          Easy to use
        • 369
          Great tool
        • 276
          Makes developing rest api's easy peasy
        • 156
          Easy setup, looks good
        • 144
          The best api workflow out there
        • 53
          It's the best
        • 53
          History feature
        • 44
          Adds real value to my workflow
        • 43
          Great interface that magically predicts your needs
        • 35
          The best in class app
        • 12
          Can save and share script
        • 10
          Fully featured without looking cluttered
        • 8
          Collections
        • 8
          Option to run scrips
        • 8
          Global/Environment Variables
        • 7
          Shareable Collections
        • 7
          Dead simple and useful. Excellent
        • 7
          Dark theme easy on the eyes
        • 6
          Awesome customer support
        • 6
          Great integration with newman
        • 5
          Documentation
        • 5
          Simple
        • 5
          The test script is useful
        • 4
          Saves responses
        • 4
          This has simplified my testing significantly
        • 4
          Makes testing API's as easy as 1,2,3
        • 4
          Easy as pie
        • 3
          API-network
        • 3
          I'd recommend it to everyone who works with apis
        • 3
          Mocking API calls with predefined response
        • 2
          Now supports GraphQL
        • 2
          Postman Runner CI Integration
        • 2
          Easy to setup, test and provides test storage
        • 2
          Continuous integration using newman
        • 2
          Pre-request Script and Test attributes are invaluable
        • 2
          Runner
        • 2
          Graph
        • 1
          <a href="http://fixbit.com/">useful tool</a>
        CONS OF POSTMAN
        • 10
          Stores credentials in HTTP
        • 9
          Bloated features and UI
        • 8
          Cumbersome to switch authentication tokens
        • 7
          Poor GraphQL support
        • 5
          Expensive
        • 3
          Not free after 5 users
        • 3
          Can't prompt for per-request variables
        • 1
          Import swagger
        • 1
          Support websocket
        • 1
          Import curl

        related Postman posts

        Noah Zoschke
        Engineering Manager at Segment · | 30 upvotes · 3M views

        We just launched the Segment Config API (try it out for yourself here) — a set of public REST APIs that enable you to manage your Segment configuration. A public API is only as good as its #documentation. For the API reference doc we are using Postman.

        Postman is an “API development environment”. You download the desktop app, and build API requests by URL and payload. Over time you can build up a set of requests and organize them into a “Postman Collection”. You can generalize a collection with “collection variables”. This allows you to parameterize things like username, password and workspace_name so a user can fill their own values in before making an API call. This makes it possible to use Postman for one-off API tasks instead of writing code.

        Then you can add Markdown content to the entire collection, a folder of related methods, and/or every API method to explain how the APIs work. You can publish a collection and easily share it with a URL.

        This turns Postman from a personal #API utility to full-blown public interactive API documentation. The result is a great looking web page with all the API calls, docs and sample requests and responses in one place. Check out the results here.

        Postman’s powers don’t end here. You can automate Postman with “test scripts” and have it periodically run a collection scripts as “monitors”. We now have #QA around all the APIs in public docs to make sure they are always correct

        Along the way we tried other techniques for documenting APIs like ReadMe.io or Swagger UI. These required a lot of effort to customize.

        Writing and maintaining a Postman collection takes some work, but the resulting documentation site, interactivity and API testing tools are well worth it.

        See more
        Simon Reymann
        Senior Fullstack Developer at QUANTUSflow Software GmbH · | 27 upvotes · 5.3M views

        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.
        See more
        Postman logo

        Postman

        95K
        1.8K
        Only complete API development environment
        95K
        1.8K
        PROS OF POSTMAN
        • 490
          Easy to use
        • 369
          Great tool
        • 276
          Makes developing rest api's easy peasy
        • 156
          Easy setup, looks good
        • 144
          The best api workflow out there
        • 53
          It's the best
        • 53
          History feature
        • 44
          Adds real value to my workflow
        • 43
          Great interface that magically predicts your needs
        • 35
          The best in class app
        • 12
          Can save and share script
        • 10
          Fully featured without looking cluttered
        • 8
          Collections
        • 8
          Option to run scrips
        • 8
          Global/Environment Variables
        • 7
          Shareable Collections
        • 7
          Dead simple and useful. Excellent
        • 7
          Dark theme easy on the eyes
        • 6
          Awesome customer support
        • 6
          Great integration with newman
        • 5
          Documentation
        • 5
          Simple
        • 5
          The test script is useful
        • 4
          Saves responses
        • 4
          This has simplified my testing significantly
        • 4
          Makes testing API's as easy as 1,2,3
        • 4
          Easy as pie
        • 3
          API-network
        • 3
          I'd recommend it to everyone who works with apis
        • 3
          Mocking API calls with predefined response
        • 2
          Now supports GraphQL
        • 2
          Postman Runner CI Integration
        • 2
          Easy to setup, test and provides test storage
        • 2
          Continuous integration using newman
        • 2
          Pre-request Script and Test attributes are invaluable
        • 2
          Runner
        • 2
          Graph
        • 1
          <a href="http://fixbit.com/">useful tool</a>
        CONS OF POSTMAN
        • 10
          Stores credentials in HTTP
        • 9
          Bloated features and UI
        • 8
          Cumbersome to switch authentication tokens
        • 7
          Poor GraphQL support
        • 5
          Expensive
        • 3
          Not free after 5 users
        • 3
          Can't prompt for per-request variables
        • 1
          Import swagger
        • 1
          Support websocket
        • 1
          Import curl

        related Postman posts

        Noah Zoschke
        Engineering Manager at Segment · | 30 upvotes · 3M views

        We just launched the Segment Config API (try it out for yourself here) — a set of public REST APIs that enable you to manage your Segment configuration. A public API is only as good as its #documentation. For the API reference doc we are using Postman.

        Postman is an “API development environment”. You download the desktop app, and build API requests by URL and payload. Over time you can build up a set of requests and organize them into a “Postman Collection”. You can generalize a collection with “collection variables”. This allows you to parameterize things like username, password and workspace_name so a user can fill their own values in before making an API call. This makes it possible to use Postman for one-off API tasks instead of writing code.

        Then you can add Markdown content to the entire collection, a folder of related methods, and/or every API method to explain how the APIs work. You can publish a collection and easily share it with a URL.

        This turns Postman from a personal #API utility to full-blown public interactive API documentation. The result is a great looking web page with all the API calls, docs and sample requests and responses in one place. Check out the results here.

        Postman’s powers don’t end here. You can automate Postman with “test scripts” and have it periodically run a collection scripts as “monitors”. We now have #QA around all the APIs in public docs to make sure they are always correct

        Along the way we tried other techniques for documenting APIs like ReadMe.io or Swagger UI. These required a lot of effort to customize.

        Writing and maintaining a Postman collection takes some work, but the resulting documentation site, interactivity and API testing tools are well worth it.

        See more
        Simon Reymann
        Senior Fullstack Developer at QUANTUSflow Software GmbH · | 27 upvotes · 5.3M views

        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.
        See more
        Stack Overflow logo

        Stack Overflow

        69.3K
        893
        Question and answer site for professional and enthusiast programmers
        69.3K
        893
        PROS OF STACK OVERFLOW
        • 257
          Scary smart community
        • 206
          Knows all
        • 142
          Voting system
        • 134
          Good questions
        • 83
          Good SEO
        • 22
          Addictive
        • 14
          Tight focus
        • 10
          Share and gain knowledge
        • 7
          Useful
        • 3
          Fast loading
        • 2
          Gamification
        • 1
          Knows everyone
        • 1
          Experts share experience and answer questions
        • 1
          Stack overflow to developers As google to net surfers
        • 1
          Questions answered quickly
        • 1
          No annoying ads
        • 1
          No spam
        • 1
          Fast community response
        • 1
          Good moderators
        • 1
          Quick answers from users
        • 1
          Good answers
        • 1
          User reputation ranking
        • 1
          Efficient answers
        • 1
          Leading developer community
        CONS OF STACK OVERFLOW
        • 3
          Not welcoming to newbies
        • 3
          Unfair downvoting
        • 3
          Unfriendly moderators
        • 3
          No opinion based questions
        • 3
          Mean users
        • 2
          Limited to types of questions it can accept

        related Stack Overflow posts

        Tom Klein

        Google Analytics is a great tool to analyze your traffic. To debug our software and ask questions, we love to use Postman and Stack Overflow. Google Drive helps our team to share documents. We're able to build our great products through the APIs by Google Maps, CloudFlare, Stripe, PayPal, Twilio, Let's Encrypt, and TensorFlow.

        See more
        Google Maps logo

        Google Maps

        41.8K
        567
        Build highly customisable maps with your own content and imagery
        41.8K
        567
        PROS OF GOOGLE MAPS
        • 253
          Free
        • 136
          Address input through maps api
        • 82
          Sharable Directions
        • 47
          Google Earth
        • 46
          Unique
        • 3
          Custom maps designing
        CONS OF GOOGLE MAPS
        • 5
          Google Attributions and logo
        • 2
          Only map allowed alongside google place autocomplete

        related Google Maps posts

        Tom Klein

        Google Analytics is a great tool to analyze your traffic. To debug our software and ask questions, we love to use Postman and Stack Overflow. Google Drive helps our team to share documents. We're able to build our great products through the APIs by Google Maps, CloudFlare, Stripe, PayPal, Twilio, Let's Encrypt, and TensorFlow.

        See more

        A huge component of our product relies on gathering public data about locations of interest. Google Places API gives us that ability in the most efficient way. Since we are primarily going to be using as google data as a source of information for our MVP, we might as well start integrating the Google Places API in our system. We have worked with Google Maps in the past and we might take some inspiration from our previous projects onto this one.

        See more
        Elasticsearch logo

        Elasticsearch

        34.7K
        1.6K
        Open Source, Distributed, RESTful Search Engine
        34.7K
        1.6K
        PROS OF ELASTICSEARCH
        • 328
          Powerful api
        • 315
          Great search engine
        • 231
          Open source
        • 214
          Restful
        • 200
          Near real-time search
        • 98
          Free
        • 85
          Search everything
        • 54
          Easy to get started
        • 45
          Analytics
        • 26
          Distributed
        • 6
          Fast search
        • 5
          More than a search engine
        • 4
          Great docs
        • 4
          Awesome, great tool
        • 3
          Highly Available
        • 3
          Easy to scale
        • 2
          Potato
        • 2
          Document Store
        • 2
          Great customer support
        • 2
          Intuitive API
        • 2
          Nosql DB
        • 2
          Great piece of software
        • 2
          Reliable
        • 2
          Fast
        • 2
          Easy setup
        • 1
          Open
        • 1
          Easy to get hot data
        • 1
          Github
        • 1
          Elaticsearch
        • 1
          Actively developing
        • 1
          Responsive maintainers on GitHub
        • 1
          Ecosystem
        • 1
          Not stable
        • 1
          Scalability
        • 0
          Community
        CONS OF ELASTICSEARCH
        • 7
          Resource hungry
        • 6
          Diffecult to get started
        • 5
          Expensive
        • 4
          Hard to keep stable at large scale

        related Elasticsearch posts

        Tim Abbott

        We've been using PostgreSQL since the very early days of Zulip, but we actually didn't use it from the beginning. Zulip started out as a MySQL project back in 2012, because we'd heard it was a good choice for a startup with a wide community. However, we found that even though we were using the Django ORM for most of our database access, we spent a lot of time fighting with MySQL. Issues ranged from bad collation defaults, to bad query plans which required a lot of manual query tweaks.

        We ended up getting so frustrated that we tried out PostgresQL, and the results were fantastic. We didn't have to do any real customization (just some tuning settings for how big a server we had), and all of our most important queries were faster out of the box. As a result, we were able to delete a bunch of custom queries escaping the ORM that we'd written to make the MySQL query planner happy (because postgres just did the right thing automatically).

        And then after that, we've just gotten a ton of value out of postgres. We use its excellent built-in full-text search, which has helped us avoid needing to bring in a tool like Elasticsearch, and we've really enjoyed features like its partial indexes, which saved us a lot of work adding unnecessary extra tables to get good performance for things like our "unread messages" and "starred messages" indexes.

        I can't recommend it highly enough.

        See more
        Tymoteusz Paul
        Devops guy at X20X Development LTD · | 23 upvotes · 10.1M 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.

        See more