The three Types of Build Providers
Now that we’ve learned how a standard pipeline works, in this section, we’ll look at the different types of pipeline providers.
The three types of providers are on-premises, off-premises, and hybrid.
On-premises (meaning on-site or on-premises) relates to the software you own, which you can use to build your product at your company’s location. An advantage of on-premises build services is that once you purchase the software, you own it; there isn’t a subscription fee. So, if there’s a problem with the build server, you can easily look at the software locally to identify and fix the problem.
Off-premises (or cloud) providers are the more common services used nowadays. Since everyone wants everything yesterday, it’s quicker to set up and is usually an immediate way to create a software pipeline.
As you can guess, hybrid services are a mix of on-premises and off-premises services. Some companies like to keep control of certain aspects of software development and send the artifacts to a remote server for deployment purposes.
While hybrid services are an option, it makes more sense to use off-premises services for automated software builds.
In this section, we learned about three types of providers: on-premises, off-premises, and hybrid services. While these services are used in various companies, the majority of companies lean toward off-premises (or cloud) services to automate their software builds.
