We had a couple of projects we were working on. Much of it has to do with the combination of a recently acquired brand over at our parent company, and we were considering consolidating our cloud platform and our domain. We were also looking at moving applications from one team to another so that we could leverage them.

We also want to increase our production automation. That may have been the most leveraged part of that. There were a lot of teams, and they were doing a lot of work. It was causing levels of concern, confusion, risk, oversight, and over-expenditure.

We were looking at various applications, and CloudBees was selected so that we could consolidate and combine all of our efforts. We wanted to reduce the number of tools we were using to help deliver and standardize a lot of our processes and procedures.

The solution's most valuable feature is its flexibility. I like how CloudBees functions and how it can communicate and message progress. I like how it can be containerized, and developers can use certain aspects of it without interjecting. They can have a target audience where they can review their progress before it gets integrated into the larger scale of things.

To use the tool, you need to be familiar with the tool itself and with how it will be incorporated into the culture.

I have been using CloudBees for about a month.

I haven’t faced any issues with the solution’s stability.

I have no issues or complaints with the solution’s scalability.

We had just got to the licensing part of CloudBees, signed up, and got ready to use it. We were going to apply it to a couple of our projects, but our project was put on hold due to budgetary constraints. We really didn't get much further on the tool other than doing some independent research and studying it.

To use the tool, you probably need to do some onboarding. To use the tool, you need to be familiar with the tool itself and with how it will be incorporated into the culture. You have to be familiar with those who use it and those who get reports or information from it. The solution is worth the money.

Although CloudBees may not be the tool for everybody, I would definitely recommend that people review it and see for themselves how it can help them.

I would ask a new user to look at the main website and understand what this tool has to offer. I would also ask them to do some independent research. There are a lot of YouTube videos out there that could help break down or containerize the information they might be looking for.

They should talk with individuals who have used the tool before and get their impression. They should sign up for the free trial and see what they think about it. There are several different ways to go.

Overall, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

In general, as a DevOps user, I mostly build pipelines and deploy them. That is mostly used for deployment and release for our products and services. 

But with my profession, I'm more towards taking care of the service. I take care of the CloudBees service, which is used by teams to build and deploy their releases for production services.

We also use it for our own purpose, for our own build and releases. So you can say that I use it as a service and also as an admin who takes care of the service. So, on both sides.

CloudBees is a market leader in the CI/CD space. Jenkins, as a product, developed the CI/CD space, which holds a major portion of the DevOps area. DevOps is mostly CI/CD. So, you do your build and releases or automation using the CI/CD service.

That's what I like about it. It's very flexible. You can trigger your builds using multiple sources, you can integrate with multiple platforms, and you can automate your end-to-end product life cycle. You can automate your infrastructure builds using Terraform and other IAC tools. You can do many things with the CI/CD approach.

One challenge I'd like to highlight is that with CloudBees CI growing bigger and bigger, there are limitations in terms of managing old plugins and services and upgrading them with time.

There's always a priority thing that comes into the picture where you want something to be upgraded and fixed, but it all depends on how the priorities are set at the CloudBees side. As it is a proprietary tool, not an open-source tool, you always need to depend on the vendor. That is one challenge which I feel. It's not completely open source. Jenkins is an open-source software, but large organizations will rely more on proprietary software. 

And hence, you need to depend on them to manage the releases for their services, for their products, like for their plugins or for their features or whatsoever. So that is one thing which I feel is lagging a bit. But, overall, it's a great tool. It's a great service.

I have been using it for past six years. 

I had a couple of experiences when we went to upgrade the service. Sometimes, the plugins won't be compatible. Sometimes, some portion of the service won't be compatible with the new version, and it breaks. And when it breaks, you reach out to the support. That also comes as a new kind of error or bug at the support point of view, then it takes time for resolution.

And to be very honest, the rollback approach of this product is not that great. That is one limitation which I have, and I've faced it a couple of times with the releases.

I would rate the stability a six out of ten.

It's scalable. But, obviously, there's a limitation in terms of the number of jobs you can host. It's mostly based on the number of jobs you can host on a particular tenant. 

When you go more than eight thousand or ten thousand, which is the maximum that you can go through, the product specifies that you cannot go more than 6,000 to 8,000 jobs per host. If you go more than that, the service will get synced, it'll not be good, and it will be too slow.

That is one limitation. You cannot scale vertically on a single tenant, but you can scale horizontally with multiple tenants and scale the job. That is feasible, but it all depends on how the customer manages their infrastructure. So, there is that limitation in terms of managing instances on a single tenant. But, that completely depends on your architecture.

Scalability from one to ten, I'd rate it a seven out of ten, with ten being highly scalable. It's not really a product drawback, it's completely based on how your usage is and how your architecture is defined.

In my organization, it's approximately 6,000 developers using it across 200 tenants. So, it's a large-scale deployment.

Our company has a partnership. We have multiple orgs within the organization, multiple departments, that use Jenkins or CloudBees. In my department, I'm taking care of that.

The customer support is good. You get good representatives from CloudBees to help you and understand your requirements. They're really approachable, and you get value for money.

But there's room for improvement as it's all about priorities. They need to set some priorities, understanding the user's point of view, rather than just focusing on backlogs. It all depends on user satisfaction, which comes when the user's requirements are fulfilled. But, it obviously takes priority assessment and metrics gathering on the product side. But overall, it's good. It's decent.

Positive

It's worth it.

It is expensive for sure. But we go through ULA licensing, so that's something that is a bit cheaper compared to small-scale organizations. 

I would recommend it. CloudBees is based on open-source Jenkins. So if the users have already experienced open-source Jenkins, then they can go for CloudBees to gain that support, that customer and product support. 

So far, it's been a great tool and a great service, and it's good for agile and maintaining DevOps practices. There are other open-source software also coming into the market, but it all depends on preferences. And if you need good product support, then CloudBees is a good option.

Overall, I would rate it a seven out of ten.

As a consulting company, I implement CloudBees for our customers to standardize and globalize the use of Jenkins. This helps in providing automation for DevSecOps by automating pipelines and controlling them. 

Additionally, I use it for traditional development projects and a security audit product, which provides ROI by automating audit processes.

CloudBees helps streamline DevSecOps by automating pipelines and providing standardization and control, thereby enhancing the efficiency of my clients. The security audit product offered by CloudBees is particularly beneficial in automating audit processes, which reduces the time developers spend on audits.

The most valuable features of CloudBees include its scalability for large teams and complex pipelines, advanced security features, and extensive integration with various tools. It also offers application delivery automation, pipeline release orchestration, compliance, and audit features, and provides visibility into deployment processes.

There could be improvements in the ease of use. A better GUI instead of code-based interaction would make it more accessible to a broader audience. Additionally, incorporating more AI features in the future could enhance usability as AI becomes more advanced.

I have been using CloudBees for approximately two and a half years.

CloudBees is very stable. Issues usually arise when recommendations aren't followed, such as overloading the server.

CloudBees scales excellently. There are no significant limitations, and it can be expanded as needed by adding more servers.

CloudBees customer service and support are very good. They respond quickly, and the support quality is commendable.

Positive

I have not extensively used alternatives because I'm more involved in managing implementations rather than being a developer. However, I acknowledge that there are alternatives available in the market.

The initial setup of CloudBees is straightforward if you have the right personnel. The integration of pipelines is what requires more time and effort.

A team approach is generally needed within a corporation, involving multiple people from different departments like developers, scrum masters, architects, and SysAdmin personnel to handle installation, setup, and integration.

The licensing model of CloudBees opens up a true ROI, especially with their security audit product. It offers significant benefits by targeting the DevOps process from a security audit standpoint.

The licensing model is considered good, and while CloudBees is not cheap, it is worth the cost because of its extensive benefits. The core product and security audit product in particular provide substantial value.

There are alternatives to CloudBees, such as those offered by GitHub and Amazon. In my opinion, CloudBees leads in integrating with Jenkins, and competitors are behind in this aspect.

My advice would be that before starting, align all groups required for the project to avoid delays. Plan which teams and pipelines to target first, especially since large companies have thousands of pipelines. Detailed project planning and resource alignment are crucial to moving quickly.

I would rate it an eight out of ten.

We use tools like BuildNow for creation and Jenkins for labeling and deployment. These tools effectively serve our CI/CD needs. While they are good tools for deployment and build levels, their time can vary depending on the code we provide in the labels.

The feature is good because when I click ‘Build Now,’ the labels are automatically created in 10-15 minutes. The build quality is also fine.

To improve efficiency, they should focus on smoother label deployment. For example, if my build has four to five levels, using the ‘Build Now’ option in the Cloudreach tool currently takes about ten to fifteen minutes to complete. Reducing this time by one or two minutes would be beneficial.

I have been using CloudBees for three to four years.

I rate the solution’ stability a nine out of ten.

15-20 users are using this cloud tool.
I rate the solution’s scalability a ten out of ten.

The initial setup is easy. I have approximately four years of experience with CloudBees and various other tools, such as Bitbucket, Jira, and ServiceNow. 

I have used Jenkins. It is a highly scalable and comfortable tool, making it an excellent choice for any DevOps developer. I recommend Jenkins to DevOps professionals because it is an open-source tool with great support and flexibility. It provides a smooth pipeline experience. It allows us to create CI/CD pipelines in the cloud easily.

The CI/CD pipeline is effective for integration and deployment processes, making it more client-centric. Jenkins is a good tool for this purpose, and despite the many CI/CD tools available in the market, such as Teradata and others, Jenkins remains a very reliable and widely-used tool.

Overall, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

We are running over 200 applications in CloudBees. We integrate different DevOps tools like Vault, SonarQube, Nexus, Nexus IQ, and Ansible with CloudBees. We use the tool to create multiple pipelines, like multi-branch pipelines, declarative pipelines, standalone pipelines, and parameterized pipelines.

We upgrade CloudBees on a time-to-time basis. We create the Docker images and push them to Harbor using CloudBees. We also create nodes like the Ansible and Docker nodes to run the images on that particular node. For the dot net application, we configured the Windows slave machine on CloudBees.

CloudBees's user interface is very simple and user-friendly. If anyone knows a little bit about CloudBees, they can understand it better regarding where to go, how to go, how to create a pipeline, and what parameters they have to configure. Users don't have to dig too much. They just need to log in, and everything is there for them to read and operate.

I noticed that CloudBees runs too slowly because some applications run more than 50 pipelines. When we try to open it, it takes too long and shows an error message saying the service is unavailable. While raising a case with the vendor, the vendor asks us to share the support bundle logs for the pipeline. When we try to download the support bundle logs, it still shows me the service unavailable error.

When we tell the support team about our problem, we don't get the exact solution. The same issues keep repeating, and they ask us to upgrade the plug-in for many issues. However, upgrading the plug-in does not help fix the issue.

We are facing some issues for which we have tried everything, but it hasn't been fixed. The support team told us to upgrade the version to fix those issues, but I don't know whether that was correct.

Neutral

The solution's initial setup is simple for someone who knows CloudBees well.

We have an option called configuration management in the cloud. We have installed a Vault plugin and mentioned the Vault URL and the token in the configuration management. Using that, we have integrated CloudBees with Vault. For SonarQube, we installed a SonarQube plugin and then mentioned the URL, username, and password. Using that, we integrated SonarQube with CloudBees.

I would recommend the solution to other users. New users should see the plug-ins and features, regardless of their version. When you try to implement CloudBees in your environment, you should build the infrastructure based on how many applications CloudBees can support and how many pipelines you will run on those applications. This prevents CloudBee's performance from becoming slow.

Customers will get upset and give bad reviews if the solution's performance worsens. Users must keep these things in mind before implementing CloudBees in their environment.

Overall, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.