These days I think the "do I need CI/CD" is out of the question, because we can't imagine modern frontend development without a robust CI/CD system. But, as always, the devil is in the details, because the productivity and the amount of time spent on integration will largely depend on the choice of tool.

I'm in charge of development at JINGU, where we build quite complex react and react-native e-commerce apps. In each new project, we educate our clients about the importance of devops culture and especially the impact of CI/CD on the development process and TTM (time-to-market).

Picking of the new tool

We were recently at the stage of choosing a CI/CD tool for a new project, and this time we decided to try something new because of issues with the current tools in use (a few words about that later).

If you try to google "ci cd tools," you will be amazed at the number of tools available on the market now. When we started looking, we noticed that among well known and time-tested tools, brand new services with excellent ux and pleasant prices began to appear. One of them was Buddy. After reading a few tutorials, we decided to try to bootstrap build and deploy pipeline for our react app.

Experience

First of all, I want to say that the overall experience with Buddy is awesome. There are a lot of ready-to-use actions here with a simple ui. If you want to quickly set up a CI for your project without learning yet another yaml dialect, this is what you need. When your project is mature enough, you can extract your pipeline as a regular yaml file, add it to git, and so on (as in Bitrise).

Pipeline

It took us ~2 hours to fully configure the staging pipeline and another ~2 hours to to wrap our heads around updating the environment variables and production & pull request pipelines. I think it's a notable thing that you can set up CI for a web monorepo in almost one day, depending on your experience, of course.

Final word

Just 4-5 years ago you had to be a skilled developer to manage tons of Jenkins / GitLab yaml code to bring devops practices into your project. It's so interesting to watch how the world is changing in an effort to make people's lives easier. The new CI tools once again remind us how important it is to evolve and change.

I can't even tell you how many hours we spent trying to get CircleCI to do exactly what we needed, struggling with a bunch of pitfalls like dealing with secrets, outdated orbs, github-based IAM (I think guys who use CircleCI will understand my pain).

After such a great experience, we plan to try moving some of our backend pipelines to Buddy, and something inside me says it will also be an enjoyable experience.

Don't be afraid to try new things, folks!