GoCD Reviews

I worked for a company where we had pipelines to deploy new code and make changes in the existing infrastructure on GoCD. Another team maintains it. I was a user who used the solution to create and use the pipelines.

We can see all the pipelines with a simple search. The UI is colorful. The user experience is very rich. The product is very easy to learn if we know a bit of the basics. If we have someone to show us how to use it, it is very easy.

The solution helps us deploy microservices across multiple environments.

GoCD's open-source nature is valuable. It is user-friendly as well. A key benefit is that it provides all the pipelines as code in one place, simplifying the creation of new pipelines by allowing you to reuse existing code and change the environment variables. 

Managing agents is also quite easy, as they can be enabled or turned off with just a few clicks, unlike in Jenkins.

We are currently utilizing it for the integration aspect, specifically for the deployment phase of our project. To elaborate, we have a considerable number of Amazon EC2 instances, exceeding one hundred, and various code applications that interconnect with each other. For the deployment process, we rely on GoCD as our backend, and for the depositors, we utilize GoCD. Consequently, it forms an integrated set of GoCD.

Due to the fact that the code is written in core PHP, we have opted to use GOCD.

The most notable aspect is its user interface, which we find to be user-friendly and straightforward for deploying and comprehending pipelines. We have the ability to create multiple pipelines, and in addition to that, the resource consumption is impressive. 

We use GoCD for the production environment and delivery needs, including Kubernetes container delivery.

In GoCD, you can effectively track sources and pipelines. The platform features pipeline groups that enable role differentiation, specifying who can perform which actions. Additionally, GoCD offers a valuable feature called the value stream map, which holds significant importance. The value stream map shows the complete flow of the pipeline itself, showcasing the input-output journey.

GoCD integrates seamlessly with various teams. For instance, it allows setting up top-level management access with read-only rights to monitor product deliveries, deployments, and the overall delivery process. Different teams, such as developers, QA, and testing teams, play crucial roles throughout these processes. With GoCD, you can easily track the success or failure of pipelines within different pipeline groups. This setup ensures that the QA team controls its pipelines and can modify them as necessary. In contrast, the development team cannot alter QA pipelines, maintaining segregation of responsibilities.

What sets GoCD apart is its transparency. Everything from pipeline status to progress is readily visible and accessible to all relevant parties, including management. This level of transparency eliminates the need for constant inquiries and allows stakeholders to access and understand the status of projects in real time. This transparency and accessibility are key attributes that make GoCD a precious and efficient project management and delivery tool.

We use GoCD as our main Continuous Delivery (CD) pipeline tool. We integrated GoCD with Continuous Delivery tools, such as Jenkins and Team City.

We actively using the following features of the GoCD: LDAP integration, server-agents architecture (run GoCD agents on-demand in a Kubernetes cluster or on AWS EC2 instances to keep the operations cost low), plug-in architectures, Infrastructure as a code (pipelines in GoCD could be described in code repository).

Besides all these features, GoCD has a great UI with flexible permissions management. 

GoCD provides a good UI for development, QA, release, and management teams to be able to deliver new application versions in a transparent and predictable way.

We can setup GoCD to split the permissions between teams: the DEV environment is automatically updated, only the QA team could deploy the new version to the TEST environment, and only the management/release team can deploy new versions to the sensitive environment, such as UAT/DEMO/PROD.

We wrote the custom integration of the GoCD with Team City and Jenkins using the GoCD API and pipelines configuration files.

The Pipeline concept, Fan-in Fan-out, and Compare build are the most valuable to me.

We used to run our complex build process on TFS build and release manager, but its complicated license issue restricted us to roll it out to every team, and we always found a limited configuration for it to work as expected. After we switched to GO, each team can set-up their own delivery pipeline and run it themselves. Now, we have a completely automated product delivery process.

Hackability, visual representation of build pipelines, open source Apache License 2.0

Before implementing Go we used librarian-puppet to deploy code to different Puppet master servers. With Go we were able to automate that process, implement extra code checking functionality and get a nice visual view of our environments state.