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LayerCI
What Is LayerCI?
LayerCI leverages memory snapshotting technology that merges the convenience of traditional CI pipelines with the optionality of staging servers. For every change, a developer can start your entire stack, make five copies of your database, and run automated tests in seconds instead of hours.
Who Uses LayerCI?
Companies with software developers
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Reviews of LayerCI
The new target for modern CI
Comments: Overall the team is incredibly responsive and adaptive to our needs and we've been continuously increasing the complexity of our LayerCI implementation as we build our core stack.
Pros:
- Speed. Layer caching allows most runs to complete unreasonably fast - 10x faster than our legacy CI. This is because of how Layer allows us to architect our CI to setup the environment once and reuse across many similar micro-services. - Simple. Since Layerfiles are similar to Dockerfiles, it is fairly intuitive to jump in and create your CI flows.
Cons:
Since LayerCI is still a young company, there are some commands and features that are not yet in place. There hasn't been anything we couldn't work around and the team is working fast to add additional native features to solve for these edge cases.
Alternatives Considered:
Layer made everything easier
Comments: Atmos used to have several bugs leak into production because we couldn't properly or efficiently deploy our code to a staging environment. Changes required a manual deploy, slowing down our development and QA speed. Layer made it simple: commit your changes, check if it works in Layer, then keep going.
Pros:
We had to deploy to our custom staging environment every time we wanted to test before - this cost us an incredible amount of time, especially since we work on many different features concurrently. We didn't have the time or need to set up a full solution, and Layer was a perfect medium between convenience, cost, and flexibility for us.
Cons:
There's no free trial, and it's still quite difficult to understand how to set your build up coming from a zero-experience background. I was hesitant until I saw how dedicated the customer support was, and then it was a no-brainer.
LayerCI Response
5 years ago
Hi Matthew - thanks for taking the time to review LayerCI! We're glad it has been helpful to your engineering team.
LayerCI - Fast and easy CI tool
Comments: My overall experience with LayerCI so far has been great. I especially loved the customer service and fast response times.
Pros:
LayerCI was easy and fast to integrate and setup as part of my CI pipeline. The command structure was also easy to understand and very easily integrated with the scripts I was previously using to manually deploy my code. In addition, [SENSITIVE CONTENT HIDDEN] has been very responsive to answering any questions I might have about the software and recommended practices.
Cons:
There is still some polishing needed to smooth out the rough edges. e.g. sometimes the caching was too effective.
LayerCI Response
5 years ago
Thanks for the feedback, Umar! We really appreciate it and will take your suggestions into consideration.
Alternatives Considered:
Fast and flexible CI
Pros:
LayerCI's speed makes testing and deployment easy and quick and saves me time. Other CI tools I have used often take minutes to set up an environment that takes seconds with LayerCI. This drastically speeds up my workflow and means I can accomplish more tasks in a day.
Cons:
The Layerfile syntax is based on the Dockerfile syntax with a few subtle differences. I would like to see some more documentation with regards to the differences between the two so that I can write better Layerfiles in the future.
LayerCI Response
5 years ago
Thank you for the review, Misha! We're glad that you've found LayerCI to be helpful in your workflow.
Great product for quick validation of changes to your software
Pros:
Once you have it set up and get an ephemeral environment you can do a lot of things with it. We use LayerCI at Welcome to do internal testing and also just product feature previews for internal users. We use it for our weekly demos as well sometimes. It can also be used to run tests to validate a feature. We have seen developers use the personal ephemeral environments to test multiple changes at a time without having to rebuild their own local environment. Changing the LayerCI setup is fairly easy and I like that it is infrastructure as code so that we can validate our changes on pull requests.
Cons:
Sometimes it is unclear when the product has been updated. This is a rapidly developing product so sometimes we have to fix a setup after the fact to match up with the product.
Helped our team develop & deliver features 10x faster
Pros:
I was part of the team that helped select LayerCI - It's been a great experience working with their team and the ROI has proved itself tenfold. Our team is able to release features 10x than how we were releasing before. 5/5 Stars for me!
Cons:
There isn't anything that I can think of, they're very responsive to feedback and iterations when needed.
LayerCI Response
4 years ago
Thank you Arjun for your review! - LayerCI Team
Amazing tool that helped us with our product release cycle
Pros:
It was very simple to set up and get started. The dashboard is super easy to navigate and gives you the right information at the right time when any code is pushed. This software allowed us to speed up our release times by streamlining our product development process.
Cons:
None at the moment. A great tool to work with.
LayerCI Response
4 years ago
Thank you for your feedback, Bryan! - LayerCI Team
Must have for technical teams
Comments: Amazing. 100% would recommend.
Pros:
Easy to use and set up super quickly. Really great customer support helped us get started. LayerCI has honestly made a big difference in decreasing the bugs that get through to production.
Cons:
Honestly I don't have anything that I didn't like. The LayerCI team was helpful in answering any of our questions that came up.
Good CI building time and great custommer support
Pros:
Our building time decreased largely when we started using LayerCI, but I think the best thing is their customer support. They are always ready to help us in anyway possible.
Cons:
From time to time, our builds start to take a long time. The LayerCI team is always ready to act on it, but it's kinda of a bummer.
The best on the market
Pros:
The best parts were the ease of setup, the support from their team and the thoroughness of daily use.
Cons:
No real complaints. Excited to see new updates on features.
Simple user interface
Comments: When I joined the company it was already being used and helping the team organize between builds and branch integrations
Pros:
A 4-year-old would be able to see and understand their pipeline jobs (just exaggerating). It is really simple to use because it has a clean interface. It is a huge difference when you work on a project that has more than 15 contributors and there's a way of seeing everything in a preview mode, without worrying about unstable environments on the testing phase. I also love their slack support, it is always really helpful
Cons:
I think the configuration files could be more simple and abstract just like the platform web UI
Amazing Tool
Pros:
Fast Deploy, Helps a lot testing the app before merging to master
Cons:
Nothing. All good, the support team are amazing
LayerCI is great
Comments: The team is always professional and easy to chat to!
Pros:
The product is incredibly easy to use and the team is beyond helpful! LayerCI has helped us become quite a bit more efficient in our development work.
Cons:
For our current needs and scale of company, there wasn't anything we really found was lacking with the product.
LayerCI Response
4 years ago
Thank you for sharing your experience with us! - LayerCI Team