Everything About the Best Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Deployment (CD) Tools in 2022

Right now the MLOPs market is on a boom. Consequently, the DevOps tools market is all set to witness fascinating growth.

According to a recent report by KBV Research, the global DevOps market will surge to $88 million by 2023 growing at a compound annual rate of 18%. That far outpaces the growth of the broader IT market. Moreover, according to Forrester Research, 50% of organizations have implemented DevOps, reaching out to what Forrester calls "Escape Velocity."

DevOps practices are spreading across organizations, and more and more companies every day are implementing CI/CD process. For running the process smoothly, one needs proper tools.

But before we jump further into the concepts, we must know about the best CI/CD tools available in the market.

What is Meant by Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD)?

Continuous Integration (CI) is about using automation tools to construct, test, and merge codes seamlessly. This ensures that code written by different programmers and belonging to different software companies is free from any error. Moreover, automated tests enable marketers to spot bugs at an early stage of the software development process and fix them immediately, thus avoiding quality issues later on once the software has been released.

Continuous Delivery (CD) is the practice of releasing software in short cycles, with greater speed and frequency. New codes are released in smaller batches, even at times a few times a day. One doesn't need to wait for a major release in order to correct bugs or add new functionalities. The entire release process is much easier to manage and your code is more bug-resistant.

CD also means Continuous Deployment – the constant and automated production deployment of every change made to the code. In an ideal scenario, every change should be made automatically, without any human intervention.

Why You Should Opt for CI/CD Pipeline?

CI/CD offers innumerable benefits to the marketers which include the following:

• The quality of your code is improved
• Time-to-market of new features is shortened
• Automation optimizes the cost and labor
• One gets instant feedback about your code
• Communication is streamlined
• One gathers detailed metrics about the performance of their application
• Customer satisfaction improves

The next section deals with the tools that you’ll need to build your own CI/CD pipeline.

Let’s jump right into getting a sneak peek of the DevOps toolset baseline and choosing the best tools for incorporating, operating, operationalizing, and optimizing the CI/CD pipelines.

1. Jenkins

Jenkins is an open-source automation server wherein the central build and continuous integration process occur. It’s a self-sufficient Java-based program with packages for Windows, macOS, and other Unix-like operating systems. With hundreds of plugins available, Jenkins supports building, deploying, and automating software development projects.

The key features of Jenkins include:

·       Easy installation and up-gradation of various Operating Systems (OSs)

·       Simple and user-friendly interface

·       Extensible with huge community-contributed plugin resource

·       Easy environment configuration in the user interface

·       Supporting distributed builds with master-slave architecture

·       Building schedules based on expressions

·       Supporting shells and Windows command execution in pre-build steps

·       Supporting notifications on the build status

License – Jenkins is open-source software and has an active community

2) CircleCI

CircleCI is a CI/CD tool that supports rapid software development and publishing. CircleCI allows automation across the users' pipeline ranging from code building and testing to deployment.

One can integrate CircleCI with GitHub, GitHub Enterprise, and Bitbucket to create builds when new code lines are committed. CircleCI also hosts continuous integration under the cloud-managed option or runs behind a firewall on private infrastructure.

The key features of CircleCI include the following:

• Integration with Bitbucket, GitHub, and GitHub Enterprise

• Runs build using a container or virtual machine

• Easy debugging

• Automated parallelization

• Quick tests

• Personalized email, and IM notifications

• Continuous and branch-specific deployment

• High customizable

• Automated merging and custom commands for package uploading

• One needs to set up unlimited builds

License: Linux plans to start with the option to run one job without parallelism at no charge. Open-source projects get three additional free containers. At the time of signing up, one can see the pricing to decide which plan one intends on.

Here’s the link to the platform - https://circleci.com/.

3) TeamCity

TeamCity is the continuous integration server by JetBrain, which enables the building and deployment of an array of projects including integration with Visual Studios and IDEs. The tool can be installed for both Windows and Linux servers and supports .NET and open stack projects.

TeamCity 2019.1 enables new UI and native GitLab integration. It also supports GitLab and Bitbucket server pull requests. The release includes token-based authentication, detection, reporting of Go tests, and AWS Spot Fleet requests.

The key features of TeamCity include the following:

• Multiple ways to reuse settings and configurations of the parent project to the subproject
• Runs parallel builds simultaneously on different environments
• The tool enables running history builds, viewing test history reports, pinning, tagging, and adding builds to the favorites
• The platform is easy to customize, interact and extend the server
• The platform keeps the CI server functional and stable
• Flexibility with user management, user assignment roles, sorting users into groups, different ways of user authentication, and a log with all the user actions for transparency of all activities to the server becomes quintessential

TeamCity is a commercial tool with both free and proprietary licenses. Here’s the link to the homepage of the tool - https://www.jetbrains.com/teamcity/.

4)   Bamboo

This continuous integration server automates the management of server application releases, thus creating a pipeline for continuous delivery. Bamboo covers building and functional testing, assigning versions, tagging releases, deploying, and activating new versions on production.

The key features of the tool include the following:

• The tool supports up to 100 remote build agents
• The tool runs an array of test batches in parallel that allows users to get feedback quickly
• Images can be created and pushed into a registry
• The tool seeks pre-environment permissions that assist developers and testers to deploy to their environments on-demand while the production stays locked down
• The tool can detect new branches in Git, Mercurial, SVN Repos and this applies to the CI scheme of the mainline to term automatically
• The tool triggers build based on changes detected in the repository and push notifications from a platform called Bitbucket, a set schedule, the completion of another build, or an amalgamation thereof

5) Tekton

This platform was originally developed by Google. The tool is an open-source framework for creating continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) systems. By deploying Tekton, one can build, test and deploy software across an array of multi-cloud providers or on-premises systems by creating an abstraction layer with all the underlying implementation details. The tool is being increasingly deployed on platforms such as IBM Cloud, OpenShift, and VMware Tanzu, and is gaining popularity.

The main features of the platform include the following:

• A set of extensions for the custom resource to Kubernetes that defines CI/CD style pipelines and related concepts
• These custom resources are described in YAML source files and stored in a code repository where they can be versioned
• One can create and deploy immutable images, manage version control of infrastructure, and perform easier rollbacks
• One can also leverage advanced deployment patterns like rolling, blue/green, canary deployment, or GitOps workflow
• Tekton being a Kubernetes-native platform can crate cloud-native CI/CD pipelines quickly
• Despite being Kubernetes native, the platform can be used to deploy to any kind of environment (Kubernetes cluster, virtual machines, etc.)
• The tool offers all benefits of a cloud-native CI/CD pipeline tool – high availability, centralized logging and monitoring, and default self-healing
• By leveraging the pipeline-as-code approach the users can benefit from versioning and source control

6) GitLab

This tool is amongst the suite of tools used for managing different aspects of the software development lifecycle. The core product is a web-based Git repository manager with features such as issue tracking, analytics, and a Wiki.

The platform allows marketers to trigger builds, run tests, and deploy code with each commit or push. One can build jobs in a virtual machine, Docker container, or even on another server.

The key features of GitLab include the following:

• Viewing, creating, and managing codes and projecting data from a single distributed version control system, enabling rapid iteration and delivery of business values
• The tool provides a single source of truth and scalability for collaborating on projects & code
• The tool assists delivery teams completely to embrace CI by automating the builds, integration, and verification of source codes
• The tool assists with container scanning, static application security testing (SAST), dynamic application security testing (DAST), and dependency scanning to deliver secure applications along with license compliance

Github is a commercial tool & a free package. The platform offers to host SaaS on GitLan or on your instance on-premises and/ or on the public cloud. The link to the page is - https://about.gitlab.com/.

7) Buddy

Buddy is a CI/CD software that builds, tests, and deploys websites and applications with code from GitHub, Bickbucket, and GitLab. The tool employs Docker containers with pre-installed languages and frameworks to build on, along with DevOps, monitoring, and notifying actions.

The key features of the tool include:

• Easy to customize Docker-based images as a test environment

• Smart change detection, state-of-the-art caching, parallelism, and all-around optimizations

• Create, customize, and reuse build and test environments

• Plain and encrypted, fixed and settable scopes, workspace, project, pipeline, actions

• Attachable services with Elastic, MariaDB, Memcached, Mongo, PostgreSQL, RabbitMQ, Redis, Selenium Chrome, and Firefox

• Monitor with real-time progress and logos, unlimited history

• Workflows management with templates to clone, export, and import pipelines

• First-class Git support and integrations

Buddy is a free commercial tool.

8) Travis CI

This is a CI service that enables the building and testing of projects. Travis CI automatically detects new commits made and pushed to a GitHub repository. After every new code commit, Travis CI builds the project and runs tests accordingly.

The tool supports many in-built configurations and languages such as Node, PHP, Python, Java, Perl, and so on.

The key features of Travis CI are as under:

• Quick setup

• Live build views for GitHub projects monitoring

• Pulling request support

• Deployment to multiple cloud services

• Pre-installed database services

• Auto deployments on passing builds

• Clean VMs for every build

• Supports macOS, Linus, and iOS & multiple languages, such as Android, C, C#, C++, Java

Travis CI is a hosted CI/CD service. Private projects can be tested on travis-ci.com or on a free basis. Open source projects may be applied at no charge on travis-ci.org.

9) Codeship

This one is a hosted platform that supports early and automatic software releases multiple times. This tool helps software companies develop better products faster by optimizing the testing and release processes.

 The key features of Codeship include:

• Integration with any tools, services, and cloud environments of choice

• The platform is easy to use and enables faster and more thorough developer support

• The platform gets built and deployments work acceleratory with its turnkey environment and simple UI

• There’s an option to select AWS instance size, CPU, and memory

• The platform sets up teams and permissions for both organizations and team members with a notification center

• The platform allows seamless third-party integrations, smart notification management, and project dashboards to provide a high-level overview of your projects and their health

The platform licenses around 100 build per month for free and the unlimited ones start at around $49/month. One can even pay for more concurrent builds or more parallel pipelines with larger instance sizes.

10) Appveyor

This platform is a hosted service that can be built, tested, and can deploy projects on Windows and Ubuntu virtual environments. It supports, and an array of build tools such as Visual Studio, MSBuild, Psake, PowerShell, etc. This tool integrates well with GitHub, Gitlab, Atlassian Bitbucket, and many other popular repositories. Though Appveyor supports Linux-based projects, it has been widely made popular by its strong Windows support and focus.

In Conclusion

The tools enlisted here are some of the most popular ones in the market and will help you choose software that is currently the most popular one in the market. In general, the requirements of a company, its existing infrastructure, and the room for potential and improvement are the prime factors that impact your final choice when it comes to deciding on a tool that impacts your final choice.

As the CI/CD and DevOps trends continue to grow and evolve, there always is ample space for the market to grow and improve. As the landscape transforms, developers have to keep themselves abreast of the continual opportunities to create a better product. The code is then thoroughly and continuously tested to keep problems from arising. From here onwards the code can be successfully deployed to production to be continually delivered to the live environment.

With continuously running development cycles, you want to ensure that the pipelines are working seamlessly and free of issues. We’ve all been in the situation where we're developing a product, and it seems like CI/CD is making life harder and more complicated. There were many occasions when CI/CD wasn't working as planned – builds would fail, merge conflicts would appear, and versions weren't being updated. We've been there too! Through thorough investigation and benchmark analysis, we’ve compiled this list of the best tools for CI/CD.