Continuous integration/Continuous delivery (CI/CD) is positively impacting software development teams. It is becoming a common agile practice that is widely been adopted by organizations around the world. The rising importance of CI/CD is evident as 50% of developers now confirm regular usage of CI/CD tools, with a significant 25% having adopted a new tool within the past year.
In today’s rapidly evolving tech landscape, the competition is fierce. The use of CI/CD tools is not just beneficial but necessary to stay ahead. These tools enhance operations by automating processes, reducing human error, and allowing developers to focus on innovative solutions rather than routine tasks.
Hence, for the same, it is advisable to have good CI/CD tools to leverage the team’s current workflow and build a reliable CI/CD pipeline. This integration accelerates the development process and significantly lowers the delivery time to end-users, increasing productivity and product reliability. CI/CD tools are especially valuable for managing and automating tasks within cloud infrastructure, enabling efficient and scalable cloud operations.
Whether you’re part of a small startup or a large enterprise, incorporating CI/CD tools into your development practices is crucial. As we progress, the role of these tools will continue to expand, deeply embedding themselves into the fabric of modern software development and integrating seamlessly with cloud services. Additionally, there is a growing trend toward embedding security scans, such as SAST and DAST, directly into the CI/CD pipeline, with tools like GitLab CI/CD offering built-in security features.
There are an overflowing number of CI/CD tools available in the market right now. Thus, we have listed the top 14 tools to know about in 2024. But, before we move forward, understand these two distinct phases: Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery. Many CI/CD tools now offer both cloud-hosted and self-hosted options to meet specific security or data residency requirements.
CI refers to the practices that drive the software development team to automatically and frequently integrate code changes into a shared source code repository. Code integration is a key aspect of CI, enabling teams to streamline the process of merging and validating changes. It helps in speeding up the process of building, packaging, and testing the applications. Although automated testing is not strictly part of CI, it is usually implied.
With this methodology, the team members can check whether the application is broken whenever new commits are integrated into the new branch. Pull requests can also trigger automated CI workflows to ensure code quality before merging changes into the main branch. It allows them to catch and fix quality issues early and get quick feedback.
This ensures that the software products are released to the end-users as quickly as possible (Every week, every day, or multiple times a day - As per the organization) and can create more features that provide value to them.
The CD begins when the continuous integration ends in the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC).
It is an approach that allows teams to package software and deploy it into the production environment. CD automates the release process, enabling faster and more reliable software delivery. It includes staging, testing, and deployment of CI code, often using build and deployment pipelines to automate these steps.
It assures that the application is updated continuously with the latest code changes and that new features are delivered to the end users quickly. Hence, it helps to reduce the time to market and of higher quality.
Moreover, continuous delivery minimizes downtime due to the removal of manual steps and human errors.
CI/CD pipeline helps in building and delivering software to end-users at a rapid pace. It allows the development team to launch new features faster, implement deployment strategy, and collect feedback to incorporate promptly in the upcoming update. By automating processes, automation jobs play a crucial role in accelerating the CI/CD pipeline and reducing time to market.
CI/CD pipeline offers regular updates on the products and a set of metrics that include building, testing, coverage, and more. For teams using cloud-based CI/CD tools, cloud cost management is also a valuable metric, providing visibility into the expenses associated with deployments. The release cycles are short and targeted and maintenance is done during non-business hours saving the entire team valuable time.
CI/CD pipeline gives real-time feedback on code quality, test results, and deployment status. It can also provide feedback on code changes across multiple versions of the application or environment, ensuring compatibility and reliability. It provides timely feedback to work more efficiently, identify issues earlier, gather actionable insights, and make iterative improvements.
CI/CD pipeline encourages collaboration between developers, testers, and operation teams to reduce bottlenecks and facilitate communication. CI/CD tools that support different version control systems make it easier for teams using various source code repositories to collaborate seamlessly. Through this, the team can communicate effectively about test results and take the desired action.
CI/CD pipeline enforces a rigorous testing process and conducts automated tests at every pipeline stage. The code changes are thoroughly tested and validated to reduce the bugs or regressions in software. Additionally, CI/CD tools with enhanced security features help maintain high quality and protect the software by providing advanced protection and compliance capabilities.
Why Continuous Improvement Matters in Software Development
Continuous improvement is crucial in the software development lifecycle for several compelling reasons.
In essence, continuous improvement paves the way for robust, reliable, and user-friendly software, ensuring long-term success in the fast-paced software industry.
It is a software development platform for managing different aspects of the software development lifecycle. With its cloud-based CI and deployment service, this tool allows developers to trigger builds, run, tests, and deploy code with each commit or push. GitLab also offers a free tier, which provides a limited number of build minutes and features suitable for small teams or open-source projects.
GitLab CI/CD also assures that all code deployed to production adheres to all code standards and best practices, leveraging its integrated source code management capabilities.
GitHub Actions is a comparatively new tool for performing CI/CD. It automates, customizes, and executes software development workflows right in the repository. GitHub Actions is focused on enabling developers to automate and customize their workflows, empowering them to efficiently manage CI/CD processes within GitHub. It is free for public repositories with generous usage limits.
GitHub Actions can also be paired with packages to simplify package management. It creates custom SDLC workflows in the GitHub repository directly and supports event-based triggers for automated build, test, and deployment, and integrates with third party tools to extend functionality.
Jenkins is the first CI/CD tool that provides thousands of plugins to support building and deploying projects. It is an open source as well as a self-hosted automated server, and is widely recognized as an open source automation server in which the central build and continuous integration take place. This tool can also be turned into a continuous delivery platform for any project. Open-source tools like Jenkins offer unmatched flexibility but require more maintenance compared to simpler cloud-based SaaS options. Jenkins is open-source and free to use, but users must pay for the infrastructure it runs on.
It is usually an all-rounder choice for the modern development environment.
CircleCI is a CI/CD tool that is certified with FedRAMP and SOC Type II compliant. It helps in achieving CI/CD in open-source and large-scale projects. Furthermore, CircleCI excels in continuous integration for both web applications and mobile platforms, making it a versatile choice for developers across various domains. CircleCI is also known for its strong automation capabilities and deep Docker support.
CircleCI provides two host offerings:
By integrating these capabilities, CircleCI stands out as a powerful tool for developers aiming to enhance operational efficiency and speed in both web and mobile application development.
An integrated CI/CD tool that is integrated into Bitbucket. As a version control system, Bitbucket enables seamless integration with CI/CD pipelines, allowing for efficient code collaboration, fetching, and deployment workflows. It automates code from test to production and lets developers track how pipelines are moving forward at each step.
Bitbucket pipelines ensure that code has no merge conflicts, accidental code deletions, or broken tests. Cloud containers are generated for every activity on Bitbucket that can be used to run commands with all the benefits of brand-new system configurations.
A CI/CD tool that helps in building and deploying different types of projects on GitHub and Bitbucket. It runs in a Java environment and supports .Net and open-stack projects. TeamCity is also compatible with diverse infrastructure setups, allowing seamless integration across various sources, platforms, and frameworks.
TeamCity offers flexibility for all types of development workflow and practices. It archives or backs up all modifications errors and builds for future use.
Semaphore is a CI/CD platform with a pull-request-based development workflow. Through this platform, developers can automate build, test, and deploy software projects with the continuous feedback loop. As one of the essential tools for modern CI/CD workflows, Semaphore plays a key role in efficient cloud management and deployment processes.
Semaphore is available on a wide range of platforms such as Linux, MacOS, and Android. This tool can help in everything i.e. simple sequential builds to multi-stage parallel pipelines.
Azure DevOps by Microsoft combines continuous integration and continuous delivery pipeline to Azure. It includes self-hosted and cloud-hosted CI/CD models for Windows, Linux, and MacOS. Azure DevOps is an all-in-one CI/CD platform that integrates project tracking, artifact management, and testing tools.
Azure Test Plans, a key feature of Azure DevOps, supports manual and exploratory testing. It integrates with other Azure DevOps tools to streamline test management and enhance software quality assurance processes.
It builds, tests, and deploys applications to the transferred location. The transferred locations include multiple target environments such as containers, virtual machines, or any cloud platform.
Bamboo is a CI/CD server by Atlassian that helps software development teams automate the process of building, testing, and deploying code changes. It covers building and functional testing versions, tagging releases, and deploying and activating new versions on productions. Bamboo Data Center is a comprehensive, self-hosted CI/CD platform designed for large-scale enterprises, offering high availability and seamless integration with other Atlassian tools within the Data Center ecosystem. TeamCity, developed by JetBrains, is another robust CI/CD platform that offers extensive support for various programming languages and VCS types.
This streamlines software development and includes a feedback loop to make stable releases of software applications.
An open-source CI/CD tool that is a Python-based twisted framework. It automates complex testing and deployment processes. Buildbot is also well-suited for managing complex CI/CD workflows, enabling teams to orchestrate intricate build and deployment pipelines. With its decentralized and configurable architect, it allows development teams to define and build pipelines using scripts based on Python.
Buildbot are usually for those who need deep customizability and have particular requirements in their CI/CD workflows.
Travis CI primarily focuses on GitHub users. It provides different host offerings for open-source communities and enterprises that propose to use this platform on their private cloud. Travis CI is a simple and powerful tool that lets development teams sign up, link favorite repositories, and build and test applications. As part of the CI/CD process, Travis CI can also deploy to various cloud resources, enabling teams to automate the provisioning and management of cloud infrastructure. It checks the reliability and quality of code changes before integrating them into the production codebase. Travis CI is known for its simplicity and ease of setup, particularly for projects hosted on GitHub.
Travis CI is a simple and powerful tool that lets development teams sign up, link favorite repositories, and build and test applications. As part of the CI/CD process, Travis CI can also deploy to various cloud resources, enabling teams to automate the provisioning and management of cloud infrastructure. It checks the reliability and quality of code changes before integrating them into the production codebase.
Live build views for monitoring GitHub projects can significantly assist in engineering effective developer feedback.
Codefresh is a modern CI/CD tool that is built on the foundation of GitOps and Argo. It is Kubernetes-based and comes with two host offerings: Cloud and On-premise variants.
It provides a unique, container-based pipeline for a faster and more efficient build process. Codefresh offers a secure way to trigger builds, run tests, and deploy code to targeted locations. Additionally, Codefresh supports deploying to multiple cloud providers, making it versatile for managing infrastructure across different cloud platforms.
Buddy is a CI/CD platform that builds, tests, and deploys websites and applications quickly. It includes two host offerings: On-premise and public cloud variants. It is best suited for developers, QA experts, and designers.
Buddy can not only integrate with Docker and Kubernetes, but also with blockchain technology. It gives the team direct deployment access to public repositories including GitHub. Teams that rely on Jira dashboards for project management can also benefit from seamless integration across tools.
Simple and intuitive UI is crucial for an efficient workflow, especially during code reviews.
Harness is the first CI/CD platform to leverage AI. It is a SaaS platform that builds, tests, deploys, and verifies on demand. Harness also excels at managing infrastructure by automating complex workflows and efficiently handling cloud resources through best practices in infrastructure management as code. Harness is a self-sufficient CI tool and is container-native so all extensions are standardized and builds are isolated. Moreover, it sets up only one pipeline for the entire log.
AI-driven automation is revolutionizing the CI/CD landscape by introducing several key capabilities:
By incorporating these AI-driven capabilities, Harness not only enhances individual features but also transforms the entire CI/CD pipeline into a more proactive and intelligently managed process. This leads to increased delivery cycles and improved pipeline performance.
As software development evolves, CI/CD (Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment) tools are advancing at a remarkable pace. Staying ahead in this landscape is crucial for organizations that strive to lead in technological innovation. Configuration management is becoming increasingly important in modern CI/CD pipelines, enabling teams to automate and manage large-scale cloud infrastructure and application deployments efficiently. Modern CI/CD tools like CircleCI, GitLab CI/CD, and Azure Pipelines integrate with Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tools such as Terraform, AWS CloudFormation, and Pulumi. Defining pipelines using YAML files stored in the repository is standard practice among modern CI/CD tools, enabling version control and collaboration.
Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is transforming how teams automate the provisioning and management of resources. By using code to define infrastructure, organizations can ensure consistency, reduce manual errors, and accelerate deployment cycles. These tools also help teams manage infrastructure efficiently, allowing for scalable operations and streamlined maintenance across diverse environments.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is increasingly being woven into the fabric of CI/CD pipelines. Here's how AI-driven automation can benefit your enterprise:
AI-driven CI/CD not only accelerates delivery cycles but also provides a smarter, more proactive management approach to pipeline operations.
Serverless computing is redefining traditional notions of infrastructure management, and its integration into CI/CD brings several advantages:
This trend is particularly beneficial for organizations aiming to trim operational expenses while enhancing efficiency.
Serverless computing is transforming continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) practices by removing the need for developers to manage underlying servers and infrastructure. This approach brings several key benefits:
With these advantages, serverless computing is particularly attractive to companies looking to optimize operational expenses and streamline their development workflows. The result is an environment where developers can concentrate on innovation, enhancing both productivity and software quality.
Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is emerging as a cornerstone of modern CI/CD pipelines, offering substantial advantages:
IaC tools can be used to manage resources on cloud platforms such as Google Cloud Platform, enabling automated provisioning and management of Google Cloud infrastructure. This approach streamlines deployment and resource management on GCP.
Integrating IaC into your CI/CD system can lead to faster, more dependable deployments, cutting down on errors from manual handling of infrastructure.
By adopting these cutting-edge trends, organizations can not only keep pace with technological advances but also capitalize on improved efficiency, reliability, and cost-effectiveness in their software development practices.
Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is revolutionizing the way organizations manage their infrastructure, making it an integral part of contemporary CI/CD (Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment) pipelines. Here’s how it seamlessly fits into the picture:
1. Automating Infrastructure Management
With IaC, infrastructure setup becomes code-driven, allowing automated provisioning and deprovisioning of environments. This automation ensures that each stage of deployment, whether for development, testing, or production, is consistent and efficient. By scripting these processes, teams can redeploy environments swiftly, adapting to changing requirements without manual intervention. IaC tools can provision and manage various AWS services and integrate with other AWS services, enabling end-to-end automation across the AWS ecosystem.
2. Leveraging Version Control Systems
Treating infrastructure like application code opens new dimensions in version control. Using platforms like Git, teams can version their infrastructure scripts, track changes over time, and roll back configurations if needed. This versioning encourages collaboration, enabling multiple team members to work on infrastructure setups concurrently without conflict.
3. Enhancing Collaboration and Consistency
IaC scripts are stored in code repositories, fostering an environment where developers and operations teams coalesce comfortably. By documenting infrastructure as code, organizations ensure that anyone from the team can understand the setup, enhancing transparency and boosting collaboration across different stages of the CI/CD pipeline.
4. Streamlining Testing and Deployment
Integrating IaC with CI/CD pipelines enables systematic testing of infrastructure changes. Automated tests can be triggered after every change in the infrastructure code, ensuring only validated configurations proceed to deployment. This structured approach reduces the risk of errors and enhances the reliability and predictability of deployments.
5. Reducing Human Error
By minimizing manual setup and relying on automated scripts, organizations significantly reduce the potential for human error. Automated workflows ensure that infrastructure deployments align perfectly with the code specified, leading to more reliable environments.
Incorporating IaC into CI/CD processes not only accelerates deployment timelines but also enhances the overall reliability of software releases, proving to be a vital asset in modern software development practices.
Typo seamlessly integrates with your CI/CD tools and offers comprehensive insights into your deployment process through key metrics such as change failure rate, time to build, and deployment frequency.
It also delivers a detailed overview of the workflows within the CI/CD environment. Hence, enhances visibility and facilitates a thorough understanding of the entire development and deployment pipeline.
The CI/CD tool should best align with the needs and goals of the team and organization. In terms of features, understand what is important according to the specific requirements, project, and goals. When choosing a CI/CD tool, it is essential to compare functionality against your own requirements and consider how your projects are likely to evolve in the future.
The CI/CD tool should integrate smoothly into the developer workflow without requiring many customized scripts or plugins. The tool shouldn't create friction or impose constraints on the testing framework and environment.
The CI/CD tool should include access control, code analysis, vulnerability scanning, and encryption. It should adhere to industry best practices and prevent malicious software from stealing source code.
They should integrate with the existing setup and other important tools that are used daily. Also, the CI/CD tool should be integrated with the underlying language used for codebase and compiler chains.
The tool should provide comprehensive feedback on multiple levels. It includes error messages, bug fixes, and infrastructure design. Besides this, the tool should notify of build features, test failures, or any other issues that need to be addressed.
In the dynamic world of software development, scalability emerges as a pivotal factor when selecting a CI/CD tool. As your development team expands and project demands intensify, a scalable tool becomes indispensable to maintain seamless operations.
In essence, choosing a CI/CD tool with robust scalability ensures that your team can meet growing demands and perform efficiently, without inflating expenditures or compromising quality.
The CI/CD tools mentioned above are the most popular ones in the market. Make sure you do your extensive research as well before choosing any particular tool.
All the best!
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