Build automation systems against CI lock-in : A comparative study of Dagger and Mage

Abstract

Vendor lock-in is a well-known phenomenon in the software industry. Strongly relying on vendor-specific implementation may cause financial and technological hardships to manufacturers and can establish monopoly situation of a vendor. With the spread of cloud-based development tools, vendor lock-in is present not only during operation, but also during development. This article provides an overview of risk types introduced to projects by vendor lock-in situation. Key factors of vendor lock-in are also identified, especially with regard to modern cloud-based CI/CD services. Later, a test software architecture is demonstrated how to minimize CI lock-in, followed by a detailed comparison of two build automation systems that can be used in practice for this purpose. The applicability of build automation systems is demonstrated on the implementation and test results.

Understanding the opportunities and challenges of building automation and control systems to support facility management – an extensive literature review

“…Vendor lock-in is often seen as part/result of interoperability (Kiss, 2022;Opara-Martins et al, 2016), yet there is a clear distinction. Vendor lock-in refers to the difficulties faced by facility managers when switching software and hardware vendors due to technologically complex underlying (cloud) infrastructures and a lack of universal standards (De Oliveira et al, 2017).…”

“…Vendor lock-in can occur in four areas: data transfer, application transfer, infrastructure transfer and human knowledge (Kiss, 2022). Data transfer challenges arise from incompatible data storage solutions or differences in writing patterns, resulting in service failures and loss of application functionality (Opara-Martins et al, 2016).…”

“…Calculating cost reductions for a different vendor can be complex because of the pricing and context of the vendor. Human knowledge lock-in refers to the time-consuming and costly process of training an operation team to learn the new vendor's infrastructure formats and implementation processes (Kiss, 2022).…”

“…Vendor lock-in is often seen as part/result of interoperability (Kiss, 2022; Opara-Martins et al. , 2016), yet there is a clear distinction.…”