Marg DeployBot

For basic web sites, Deploybot is extremely easy to get up and running and easy to explain the process to non-developers (like marketing folks). The traceability of deployments is also really nice.

For more complex web applications which have a build pipeline, like compilation, compression, unit testing, etc., Deploybot really falls short since it serves solely as a pipe between source control and deployment environments.

What problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

One of the recent docker-based deployment management platform with in-built testing is what best defines Deploybot.

It supports many programming languages like node.js, java, python, coffeescript, etc. out-of-the-box and the default configurations for these languages are very useful to get started with. It is quite easy to start with the defaults and then customize it for more complex scenarios.

It supports many sets of configurations for different branches of code like dev and master, which makes sure that untested or beta code dont get pushed to production. At any org level, this is a critical feature.

Builds are triggered automatically or manually, then build steps can be configured and to my surprise, it doesnt just tell you to write bash scripts but instead reads your project config files to setup/integrate automatically with tools like grunt, gulp and npm. Although it doesnt cover all the tool sets, I hope that'll only get better over time.

Deploybot is quite nice, but some of its features seem to be limited to only the popular options.

Deployment integrations cover the most popular ones, but Rackspace and Openshift were missing in the list, to my disappointment. Language Support is also limited to a few and if you have a old-ish stack of C++ or even Haskell, you have to work much harder to get things running. Also, notification to mobile via sms or email should be another basic feature that it doesnt have.

Managing teams with different access levels in not possible, making it a insecure option for larger organisations.

Recommendations to others considering the product:

What problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

1. Good guides - Deploybot has very good documentation for deployment guides, which is very helpful while setting things up. It is a growing repository which shows all the steps for building projects like Laravel and uploading automatically to VMs provided by AWS or DigitalOcean.

2. API endpoints - API endpoints let you programatically trigger a build or list/edit/delete those. While we create the builds by hand, the build triggers are used for connecting with other existing automated workflow, that we already use.

3. Building and compiling assets before deployment - Deploybot allows for building and compiling code using a script before deploying it to server. This removes the need for a separate such service or building every release before pushing to git.

4. Watch deployment progress in real time - Viewing the deployment steps occuring live along with full console output gives you the same flexibility as the older self-hosted deployment solutions. It is also easy to cancel the ongoing process at any time if anything seems wrong.

5. Rollback a release - Accidental or buggy releases can be easily rolled back with a single button, but it still takes some time to get the older release up and running.

6. Deploying without accessing servers is possible by users with low privilege access. Also, good thing is that the release notes gets shared with everyone team so that people can have a overview of all the development going on, even if they are not directly working on it.

1. Deploying using docker container is a bit cumbersome - it takes a whole different section of configurations to be filled up which is not consistent with rest of the process. Many docker deployment integrations like Google Container Engine are currently missing, making the whole thing a half-hearted solution.

2. Docker hub integration is non-existent - so you cant directly pull updated docker images from docker hub or other hubs. They contain very well maintained packages, so it is a shame that you'll need to have a custom solution for using them or use static packages instead.

3. Windows-based hosts not supported - Windows have recently announced partnership with Canonical and released docker support on Windows. This is a really great development as it allows cross-platform development on the docker platform, which is essential for enterprises with large user base. But unfortunately Deploybot doesnt support Azure to make full use of this potential.

Recommendations to others considering the product:

What problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

Easy to set up a deployment from Git to FTP and optionally include build tasks.

Does not support .NET Core out of the box - you would have to configure the VM with an install script.

Recommendations to others considering the product:

What problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

As a Enterprise user of Deploybot, I like a few solid things about it, which are a huge improvement from older softwares that we used to be trained in.

Accidental releases can be avoided and rectified quickly with real-time rollback available in Deploybot. While the deployment is in profess, it can be stopped accidentally as soon as something feels out of place or errors occur during this process. Rollback takes place within 30 seconds, which is a impressive timeframe for me as I have mostly dealt with other tools which can take upto 30 mins for this.

User Access Control is very important for us, as we believe in a strong hierarchy model for protecting access of sensitive/critical content for new recruits. Team leaders have full power of the project assigned to the team and higher administrative staffs have a overview of all projects, but not direct control over them. Deploybot has easy configuration options in their UI to make all this and even more possible.

The biggest drawback about Deploybot, that our administrators feel is not having the option of hosting it on our own servers. As we have huge number of users and their privileges are already maintained via a different service, having it hosted offline with some way of mass editing user lists is very important to administrators. That also means we wouldn't have to pay per user, but instead by a fixed mass pricing.

Recommendations to others considering the product:

What problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?