We recently attended Ansiblefest in Atlanta and Zuul had a booth there. It was a great opportunity to meet with existing and potential Zuulies. Some common questions popped up over and over again, so I wanted to crowd source some answers that we could place on our FAQ:
* How does Zuul compare to: ** Jenkins ** Molecule ** Tower * Is Zuul a replacement for Jenkins? * Does it work with GitLab?
I believe those were the majors. Let me know if you're able to contribute some responses
Cheers, Jimmy
On Thu, Oct 10, 2019, at 11:51 AM, Jimmy McArthur wrote:
We recently attended Ansiblefest in Atlanta and Zuul had a booth there. It was a great opportunity to meet with existing and potential Zuulies. Some common questions popped up over and over again, so I wanted to crowd source some answers that we could place on our FAQ:
- How does Zuul compare to:
** Jenkins
I did start an early version of this on the FAQ though I'm happy to hear suggestions for others on how we might make it more comprehensive.
** Molecule
Molecule is a test runner for Ansible. It is used to test your Ansible playbooks. Zuul is an entire CI system that leverages Ansible to run its workloads. One of the workloads that Zuul can run for you is Molecule tests.
** Tower
I'll do my best with this one but I've never used tower so feel free to correct me if I am wrong.
Zuul is designed to trigger continuous integration and deployment jobs based on events in your code review system. This means Zuul is coupled to actions like new commits showing up, reviewer approval, commits merging, git tags, and so on. Tower on the other hand is meant to trigger arbitrary Ansible playbooks on demand via arbitrary human inputs. The use cases here are slightly different. That said you can totally use Zuul to test the playbooks you add to Tower then when you trigger them in Tower you'll know they are working.
- Is Zuul a replacement for Jenkins?
For some of our users Zuul has been a replacement for Jenkins. Others use Zuul and Jenkins together. Zuul intends to be a fully featured CI and CD system that does not need Jenkins to operate. Additionally you do not need Jenkins to get any additional features in Zuul itself.
- Does it work with GitLab?
Since your shoutout on twitter we've got initial changes to support GitLab proposed in Gerrit. The stack starts at https://review.opendev.org/#/c/685682/2. For the FAQ I would say something like "A Zuul driver to support GitLab as a code review input is in the early stages of development. We hope to have this in a release as soon as possible."
I believe those were the majors. Let me know if you're able to contribute some responses
Cheers, Jimmy
Other questions that I remember:
* Can I self host my Zuul?
Absolutely. Zuul is Open Source software which you are free to deploy yourself.
* Can I run Zuul air gapped?
To function properly Zuul needs to talk to your code review system and some sort of test compute resources. As long as Zuul can talk to those (perhaps they are similarly air gapped), then running Zuul without external connectivity should be fine.
* Is there a hosted version of Zuul I can pay for?
Yes, Vexxhost has recently announced their hosted Zuul product. You can find details here: TODO_FIND_THE_URL
* Can I pay someone for Zuul support?
Perhaps we can point to Vexxhost for this too? Also we are super helpful and friendly upstream if you contact us via the mailing list and/or IRC.
Hope this helps, Clark
On Thu, Oct 10, 2019 at 04:34:48PM -0700, Clark Boylan wrote:
On Thu, Oct 10, 2019, at 11:51 AM, Jimmy McArthur wrote:
We recently attended Ansiblefest in Atlanta and Zuul had a booth there. It was a great opportunity to meet with existing and potential Zuulies. Some common questions popped up over and over again, so I wanted to crowd source some answers that we could place on our FAQ:
- How does Zuul compare to:
** Jenkins
I did start an early version of this on the FAQ though I'm happy to hear suggestions for others on how we might make it more comprehensive.
** Molecule
Molecule is a test runner for Ansible. It is used to test your Ansible playbooks. Zuul is an entire CI system that leverages Ansible to run its workloads. One of the workloads that Zuul can run for you is Molecule tests.
Yah, I would also add, that molecule does have some provisioning logic built into it too (which kinda works like nodepool). They have the ability to build and launch tests on docker, podman, vagrant, and localhost. But I agree, Zuul can not only run molecule test runner for testing roles, but could CI the molecule project.
** Tower
I'll do my best with this one but I've never used tower so feel free to correct me if I am wrong.
Zuul is designed to trigger continuous integration and deployment jobs based on events in your code review system. This means Zuul is coupled to actions like new commits showing up, reviewer approval, commits merging, git tags, and so on. Tower on the other hand is meant to trigger arbitrary Ansible playbooks on demand via arbitrary human inputs. The use cases here are slightly different. That said you can totally use Zuul to test the playbooks you add to Tower then when you trigger them in Tower you'll know they are working.
While not tower specific, since it is a downstream product, the upstream AWS project is changing a little to do more things like Zuul can. For example:
https://github.com/ansible/awx/pull/4436
adds the ability to support both github and gitlab webhook events, for the purpose of triggering a playbook in AWX. While it won't be as complex of an event system that Zuul supports, I do think there is starting to be a push for AWX to do more CI things.
- Is Zuul a replacement for Jenkins?
For some of our users Zuul has been a replacement for Jenkins. Others use Zuul and Jenkins together. Zuul intends to be a fully featured CI and CD system that does not need Jenkins to operate. Additionally you do not need Jenkins to get any additional features in Zuul itself.
- Does it work with GitLab?
Since your shoutout on twitter we've got initial changes to support GitLab proposed in Gerrit. The stack starts at https://review.opendev.org/#/c/685682/2. For the FAQ I would say something like "A Zuul driver to support GitLab as a code review input is in the early stages of development. We hope to have this in a release as soon as possible."
I believe those were the majors. Let me know if you're able to contribute some responses
Cheers, Jimmy
Other questions that I remember:
- Can I self host my Zuul?
Absolutely. Zuul is Open Source software which you are free to deploy yourself.
- Can I run Zuul air gapped?
To function properly Zuul needs to talk to your code review system and some sort of test compute resources. As long as Zuul can talk to those (perhaps they are similarly air gapped), then running Zuul without external connectivity should be fine.
- Is there a hosted version of Zuul I can pay for?
Yes, Vexxhost has recently announced their hosted Zuul product. You can find details here: TODO_FIND_THE_URL
- Can I pay someone for Zuul support?
Perhaps we can point to Vexxhost for this too? Also we are super helpful and friendly upstream if you contact us via the mailing list and/or IRC.
Hope this helps, Clark
Zuul-discuss mailing list Zuul-discuss@lists.zuul-ci.org http://lists.zuul-ci.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/zuul-discuss
On 2019-10-10 13:51:21 -0500 (-0500), Jimmy McArthur wrote:
We recently attended Ansiblefest in Atlanta and Zuul had a booth there. It was a great opportunity to meet with existing and potential Zuulies. Some common questions popped up over and over again, so I wanted to crowd source some answers that we could place on our FAQ:
[...]
Another one (or at least category) I got a lot while greeting folks at the booth:
Q. What's the catch? What's your business model? How do you expect to make money at this? Is this project venture-capital backed? Are you planning an IPO any time soon?
A. Zuul is a community-developed free/libre open-source software collaboration between contributors from a variety of organizations and backgrounds. These people have personal and professional interest in seeing Zuul succeed because they, their colleagues, and their employers want to be able to use it themselves to improve their own workflows. There is no one company backing the project, it's openly-governed by a diverse group of maintainers and anyone who's interested in helping improve Zuul is welcome to join the effort. Some companies do have business models which include running Zuul as a service or selling technical support for it, and so have an incentive to assist with writing and promoting the software, but they don't enjoy any particular position of privilege or exert special decision-making power within the project.
Of course, I think it's *possible* the reason we got asked these sorts of questions so many times is that Ansiblefest didn't have a booth sponsor category for community projects, so they lumped us into the "start-up company" sponsor category.
Thanks everone! We're working on a superuser article for this. I think we should also add these to the FAQ, but let me work on refining some of the answers with Allison and Ashleigh :)
Appreciate your help and input!
Jeremy Stanley wrote:
Q. What's the catch? What's your business model? How do you expect to make money at this? Is this project venture-capital backed? Are you planning an IPO any time soon?
A. Zuul is a community-developed free/libre open-source software collaboration between contributors from a variety of organizations and backgrounds. These people have personal and professional interest in seeing Zuul succeed because they, their colleagues, and their employers want to be able to use it themselves to improve their own workflows. There is no one company backing the project, it's openly-governed by a diverse group of maintainers and anyone who's interested in helping improve Zuul is welcome to join the effort. Some companies do have business models which include running Zuul as a service or selling technical support for it, and so have an incentive to assist with writing and promoting the software, but they don't enjoy any particular position of privilege or exert special decision-making power within the project.
Circling back on this, we have now published an article: https://superuser.openstack.org/articles/zuul-community-answers-frequent-que...
Thank you to Paul Belanger, Clark Boylan, and Jeremy Stanley for your contributions and answers! And thanks to Allison and Ashleigh for helping get this out the door.
Cheers, Jimmy
Jimmy McArthur mailto:jimmy@openstack.org October 14, 2019 at 12:10 PM Thanks everone! We're working on a superuser article for this. I think we should also add these to the FAQ, but let me work on refining some of the answers with Allison and Ashleigh :)
Appreciate your help and input!
Zuul-discuss mailing list Zuul-discuss@lists.zuul-ci.org http://lists.zuul-ci.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/zuul-discuss Jeremy Stanley mailto:fungi@yuggoth.org October 11, 2019 at 9:08 AM [...]
Another one (or at least category) I got a lot while greeting folks at the booth:
Q. What's the catch? What's your business model? How do you expect to make money at this? Is this project venture-capital backed? Are you planning an IPO any time soon?
A. Zuul is a community-developed free/libre open-source software collaboration between contributors from a variety of organizations and backgrounds. These people have personal and professional interest in seeing Zuul succeed because they, their colleagues, and their employers want to be able to use it themselves to improve their own workflows. There is no one company backing the project, it's openly-governed by a diverse group of maintainers and anyone who's interested in helping improve Zuul is welcome to join the effort. Some companies do have business models which include running Zuul as a service or selling technical support for it, and so have an incentive to assist with writing and promoting the software, but they don't enjoy any particular position of privilege or exert special decision-making power within the project.
Of course, I think it's *possible* the reason we got asked these sorts of questions so many times is that Ansiblefest didn't have a booth sponsor category for community projects, so they lumped us into the "start-up company" sponsor category. _______________________________________________ Zuul-discuss mailing list Zuul-discuss@lists.zuul-ci.org http://lists.zuul-ci.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/zuul-discuss Jimmy McArthur mailto:jimmy@openstack.org October 10, 2019 at 1:51 PM We recently attended Ansiblefest in Atlanta and Zuul had a booth there. It was a great opportunity to meet with existing and potential Zuulies. Some common questions popped up over and over again, so I wanted to crowd source some answers that we could place on our FAQ:
- How does Zuul compare to:
** Jenkins ** Molecule ** Tower
- Is Zuul a replacement for Jenkins?
- Does it work with GitLab?
I believe those were the majors. Let me know if you're able to contribute some responses
Cheers, Jimmy
Zuul-discuss mailing list Zuul-discuss@lists.zuul-ci.org http://lists.zuul-ci.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/zuul-discuss
participants (4)
-
Clark Boylan
-
Jeremy Stanley
-
Jimmy McArthur
-
Paul Belanger