Knapsack Pro

Semaphore CI vs AWS CodeBuild comparison of Continuous Integration servers
What are the differences between Semaphore CI and AWS CodeBuild?

Semaphore CI

https://semaphoreci.com

AWS CodeBuild

https://aws.amazon.com/codebuild/
Unique feature

Autoscaling made easy / Great CLI

AWS integration

Type of product

SaaS

SaaS

Offers a free plan

Yes

1,300 service minutes every month. Plans to release a free tier for open source projects.

Yes

The AWS free-tier includes 100 build-minutes per month, on their smallest machine. It's unclear, but it seems like this applies only to the first year of service.
Predictable pricing

Yes

Semaphore doesn't have traditional pricing tiers, instead it lists the types of machines you can use and their pricing per second of service. They plan to release an annual plan at some point.

Yes (partial)

While it's clear what the cost is (priced per build-minute), figuring out costs can be a hassle, especially as the price can vary quite a bit depending on commits to the project.
Support / SLA

N/A

Not clear if they offer any real SLA on support.

Yes

Paralellism
Every CI servers tends to address this differently (parallel, distributed, build matrix). Some of it is just marketing, and some is just nuance. For this table, parallel means that tasks can be run concurrently on the same machine, distributed means that tasks can be scaled horizontally, on multiple machines
How to split tests in parallel in the optimal way with Knapsack Pro

Yes

Allows defining a custom build matrix such that your build can be parallelized accross several different environments.

N/A

Distributed builds
distributed means that tasks can be scaled horizontally, on multiple machines
How to split tests in parallel in the optimal way with Knapsack Pro

N/A

N/A

Containers support / Build environment

Yes

Allows running builds inside docker containers

Yes

Builds run in specific-to-the-project, isolated environments
Analytics / Status overview
Analytics and overview referrs to the ability to, at a glance, see what's breaking (be it a certain task, or the build for a specific project)

Yes

Yes

Offers minimal information built in, but allows integrations with tools such as CloudWatch (another Amazon product), or streaming build information to your own API, for more in-depth analysis.
Management support
How easy is it to manage users / projects / assign roles and permissions and so on

Yes

Yes

Professional user management via AWS Identity and Access Management: https://aws.amazon.com/iam/
Self-hosted option

No

No

Hosted plans / SaaS

Yes

Yes

Build pipelines
A continuous delivery pipeline is a description of the process that the software goes through from a new code commit, through testing and other statical analysis steps all the way to the end-users of the product.

Yes

Allows defining complex build workflows with ease

Yes

As it's usually the case with Amazon, CodeBuild simply provides the 'build' part of a true CI/CD system, while pipelines are managed via CodePipeline, another Amazon product: https://aws.amazon.com/codepipeline/pricing/?nc=sn&loc=3
Reports
Reports are about the abilty to see specific reports (like code coverage or custom ones), but not necesarily tied in into a larger dashboard.

N/A

Yes

Offers minimal information built in, but allows integrations with tools such as CloudWatch (another Amazon product), or streaming build information to your own API, for more in-depth analysis.
Ecosystem
Besides the official documentation and software, is there a large community using this product? Are there any community-driven tools / plugins that you can use?

N/A

N/A

Specific language support: Ruby
Some CI servers have built-in support for parsing RSpec or Istanbul output for example and we mention those. Some others make it even easier by detecting Gemfiles or package.json and automate parts of the process for the developer.

Yes

Provides rich documentation on integrating Semaphore CI in Ruby projects. Also provides sudo access if you need to install system dependencies or C extensions.

No (partial)

The environments available on CodeBuilt include Ruby pre-installed: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/codebuild/latest/userguide/build-env-ref-available.html, but that seems to be as far as specific support goes
Specific language support: JavaScript

Yes

Provides rich documentation on integrating Semaphore CI in Javascript projects

No (partial)

The environments available on CodeBuilt include Node pre-installed: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/codebuild/latest/userguide/build-env-ref-available.html, but that seems to be as far as specific support goes
Integrations
1st party support for common tools (like Slack notifications, various VCS platforms, etc)

Yes

Integration with GitHub and Slack. They allow building iOS projects via their macOS Mojave VM image.

Yes

CodeBuild builds can be connected to sources such as GitHub or BitBucket, but being an Amazon Service, the deepest integrations are with other Amazon Code services (CodePipeline, CodeDeploy, and others: https://aws.amazon.com/products/developer-tools/)
API
Custom integreation is available, via an API or otherwise, it's mentioned separately as it allows further customization than any of the Ecosystem/Integration options

No

Yes

Amazon SDKs can be used to interact with CodeBuild
Auditing

Yes

Yes

Additional notes

List of features is based on Semaphore 2.0

Like most things Amazon, it becomes more valuable as you acquire and integrate various Amazon solutions, not necesarily as a standalone tool.

How to run parallel tests on Semaphore CI and AWS CodeBuild
to execute 1-hour test suite in 2 minutes?

Without Knapsack Pro

you have to wait 20 minutes for slow tests running too long on the red node

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Run fast parallel CI build with Knapsack Pro

CI build completes work in only 10 minutes because Knapsack Pro ensures all parallel nodes finish work at a similar time

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You can even run 20 parallel nodes to complete your CI build in 2 minutes

How it works

Step 1

Install Knapsack Pro client in your project


Step 2

Update your CI server config file to run tests in parallel with Knapsack Pro


Step 3

Run a CI build with parallel tests using Knapsack Pro

Diagram that shows files distributed to 3 parallel CI nodes


Knapsack Pro in Queue Mode splits tests in a dynamic way across parallel CI nodes to ensure each CI node finishes work at a similar time. Thanks to that, your CI build time is as fast as possible. It works with many supported CI servers.

How to install it

Programming Language Supported test runners Installation guide Knapsack Pro Library
README / Source
Ruby RSpec, Cucumber, Minitest, test-unit, Spinach, Turnip Install knapsack_pro gem
JavaScript Cypress.io Install @knapsack-pro/cypress
JavaScript Jest Install @knapsack-pro/jest
JavaScript / TypeScript Any test runner in JavaScript How to build native integration with Knapsack Pro API to run tests in parallel for any test runner @knapsack-pro/core
Any programming language Any test runner How to build a custom Knapsack Pro API client from scratch in any programming language -

Do you use other programming language or test runner? Let us know.

Do you know

Start using Knapsack Pro

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Get faster feedback from Semaphore CI and AWS CodeBuild server

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  • catch errors earlier
Knapsack Pro terminal

Running Rails tests in parallel on Semaphore CI 2.0 with dynamic test files split

Semaphore CI parallelism integration

Introduction to CI parallelisation with Knapsack Pro

Run tests in parallel on Semaphore CI and AWS CodeBuild in the optimal way and avoid bottleneck parallel jobs.

How much can you save with faster tests
on Semaphore CI and AWS CodeBuild?

minutes
$

Monthly you can save hours
and up to $
on faster development cycle.

Features that make your tests perform better

Discover all features or see
how to use Knapsack Pro with your CI

Trusted solution

Join the teams optimizing their tests with Knapsack Pro.

We've been really enjoying Knapsack Pro, it's been saving us a ton of time.

Devin Brown Software Engineer at Pivotal

This is a fantastic product, it's been a total game-changer for us.

Geoff Harcourt CTO at CommonLit

We are using CircleCI and we noticed that builds were being limited by the slowest parallelized container. Knapsack Pro was really east to setup and we saw huge improvements right away. Thank you for making this tool!

Martin Sieniawski Software Engineer at Collage

Knapsack Pro has helped us build an insanely fast and scalable build pipeline with almost no setup or maintenance.

Tim Lucas Co-founder of buildkite.com

Knapsack Pro saves us hours of engineer waiting time every week, and is the best solution for keeping our tests load balanced that we've used to date.

Michael Amygdalidis Senior Software Engineer at Popular Pays

I've been playing with Queue Mode. Love it! Wow, I love how fast it goes.

Michael Menne CTO at humanagency.org

I just logged into my account expecting it to say that I needed to add a credit card and was so surprised and delighted to see the trial doesn't count usage by calendar days but by testing days! This is incredible! I love it!!!

I just wanted to say that I really appreciate that small but very huge feature. Thank you for being so thoughtful :)

Shannon Baffoni Senior Software Engineer
at Blue Bottle Coffee

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