Modern cloud infrastructures require fast, agile, and efficient development operations. By implementing speedy yet accurate methodologies, companies can increase both product quality and delivery speed. The demand for continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) tools is higher than ever. Proper CI/CD tools take advantage of automation and best practices to create a streamlined integration and delivery pipeline. With simplified processes, reduced errors, and reliable delivery, CI/CD tools can revolutionize a company’s software development. With the right tools and processes on your side, your company can leverage workflow and deliver better results. Help your business thrive by learning your way around the different types of CI/CD tools.
What Is CI/CD?
Understanding continuous integration and continuous delivery is a prerequisite to understanding the tools that support this process. Combining these practices into a software integration and delivery pipeline is currently one of the most popular software development solutions. Early bug detection and frequent committing of source code allow developers to continuously deploy reliable software solutions. CI/CD helps companies tackle the challenge of quickly and reliably developing solutions that meet ever-changing market demands.
Continuous Integration
The first part of CI/CD, continuous integration, offers a software integration solution that minimizes complications and delays. When projects require frequent changes, developers must work on them as often as possible—ideally on an hourly or daily basis. If developers must wait to integrate, they can face conflicts that are difficult and time-consuming to resolve. The longer you wait, the more likely you are to face lengthy project delays. Continuous integration instructs developers to build and test code at their own workstations before sending it to the version control repository. From here, CI tools build and test the latest version of source code. Successful unit tests lead to deploying the build to automated system test environments.
Continuous Delivery
Continuous delivery, also known as continuous deployment, is the next step of this software development process. After continuous integration practices build and test codes automatically, continuous delivery processes allow the development team to deploy a build’s code changes to the testing environment at will. The continuous delivery process also includes automated system, unit, and integration testing. Additionally, developers must have an active feedback channel throughout the entire CI/CD process to quickly report any testing failures.
The Different Types of CI/CD Tools
As CI/CD tools grow in popularity, new applications continue to pour into the market. When choosing the best tool for your business, you need to think about overall quality as well as ease of use and integration. A high-quality tool that isn’t compatible with your testing software and other existing applications won’t do you any good. With your current infrastructure, budget, and project requirements in mind, learn more about these popular CI/CD tools to find the best fit for your business.
Jenkins
Jenkins is a Java-based, open-source platform available for Windows, MacOS, and Linux operating systems. This self-contained program allows real-time testing and subsequent reporting on isolated changes within a larger set of coding. With Jenkins, developers can quickly identify and fix defects in their code base. The simple and user-friendly interface also makes it easy to automate testing throughout the CI/CD process. Moreover, Jenkins is a free and high-quality tool, making it perfect for startups and enterprises alike. The active and thriving community also contributes myriad useful plugins and resources, making Jenkins a continuously evolving tool for companies to use.
CircleCI
CircleCI boasts flexibility. It can run in a range of environments and platforms and supports multiple coding languages, including C++, Javascript, Python, and more. Users can also integrate CircleCI with popular version-controlling systems like GitHub and Bitbucket. CircleCI also allows developers to run builds using containers or virtual machines. Additionally, users can reduce build times by splitting tests across multiple containers. With a fast setup, easy debugging, and unlimited builds, CircleCI streamlines the entire CI/CD pipeline. From initial builds to deployment, high levels of customization and automation make software development quick and reliable.
TeamCity
The team at JetBrains created TeamCity to help build and deploy many different types of projects. TeamCity offers many powerful features, including impressive extensibility and customization that allow developers to reuse settings of a project for the sub-project. This also enables features like running history builds, viewing test history reports, and organizing builds as favorites. TeamCity is also highly flexible and allows users to run parallel builds simultaneously on different environments. This clean and comprehensive server is stable, accessible, and easy to customize to fit your business needs.
Bamboo
Bamboo is a thorough solution that covers automatic building, testing, and releasing in a single place. This creates a continuous delivery pipeline that streamlines every aspect of CI/CD. Bamboo is also remarkably flexible and can support a myriad of programming languages, remote build agents, and technologies. Additionally, Bamboo integrates seamlessly with popular source code management tools like Bitbucket and Jira Software. Bamboo’s parallel test batches and fast feedback abilities speed up the process of identifying and fixing bugs. Bamboo can also automatically trigger builds based on changes it detects in the repository, automating the process of code changes and improved builds.
Azure DevOps
Azure DevOps by Microsoft Azure offers a simple way to construct your CI/CD pipeline within your Azure framework. Azure DevOps helps users accelerate the software development process through advanced capabilities and services like Azure Pipelines, Visual Studio Team Services, and more. This comprehensive tool contains everything you need for successful continuous integration and continuous delivery. Users can run Azure DevOps in different environments, including both virtual machines and containers. Expert automation, useful code repository management, and easy integration with Visual Studio Team Services make Azure DevOps easy for your developers to use. Additionally, Azure DevOps integrates with various programming languages and application types, making it easy to set up with your existing infrastructure.
Here at Atmosera, we offer Azure DevOps services to help clients shorten delivery cycles and deploy more reliable software in less time. Our Azure DevOps solutions can aid any size organization, using any preexisting toolset. Our expert team will align all of the tools, personnel, and other resources necessary to set up an efficient CI/CD pipeline that will improve the quality and speed of your software development practices.
