CI/CD platforms: How to choose the proper continuous integration and delivery system for your business

Organizations must embark on a scalable CI/CD DevOps implementation to harness the full potential of the modern DevOps environment. It lays a strong foundation for enabling agile DevOps for your business. In recent years, continuous integration and delivery have become mainstays in the development industry, making them nearly a must for most development workflows. In the past few years, new market participants have introduced new procedures and platforms that allow for more phases, automated testing, and even automated deployment.

What is CI/CD?

CI/CD delivers applications to clients by automating the various stages of application development. It enables continuous automation and monitoring throughout the app’s lifecycle. CI/CD is a collection of procedures frequently employed by DevOps teams to automate the testing and deployment of code. This combination of DevOps and cloud technology improves efficiency and collaboration.

Why have CI/CD on the cloud?

Implementing a CI/CD platform in your own data center is a realistic alternative, particularly for organizations that want apps and data hosted behind the firewall. The problem with this approach is that it needs a dedicated team to maintain the infrastructure and costs money to buy servers.

Cloud-hosted CI/CD software makes it easier and faster for pipelines to interface with them. In addition, CI/CD can deploy on a combination of on-premises and cloud servers. Several of the most recent CI/CD products operate in containers on Kubernetes clusters, which are equally at home on-premises or in the cloud.

Here is what is essential:

CI/CD must be connected to your repositories 

You may have deduced from the statement, “the endpoint of continuous integration is often a completed check-in to the main branch of a software repository,” repositories are vital to continuous integration and continuous delivery. Therefore, software repositories are the recommended location for storing CI and CD scripts and configuration files, in addition to being the endpoint of the check-in and testing process. Therefore, many CI/CD solutions can keep scripts and other files internally, although having them under external version control is usually preferable. Your CI/CD tools must be consistent with your programming languages and tools.

Each programming language has its own set of build and testing tools. A CI/CD tool must support all the wording used in a given project to be valuable to you. If not, you may need to create one or more plug-ins for the tool.

Do your developers understand CI/CD and the proposed tools? 

The CI and CD principles may appear obvious, but the details are not. In addition, different CI/CD tools offer varying degrees of assistance and documentation. Therefore, as part of your due diligence when selecting a tool, you may need to explore the documentation, support forums, and paid support alternatives for other products.

Different projects can use various CI/CD tools.

While this guide is about selecting a CI/CD platform, you should only assume that a single platform would be optimum for some software development initiatives. The majority of organizations employ several programming languages and environments, but only some CI/CD platforms adequately support all of them.

In general, cloud container deployments cost less than cloud server instance deployments, but serverless cloud deployments cost less than cloud container deployments. Unfortunately, as of this writing, few CI/CD platforms can operate serverless.

Serverless means the process runs by a container created on demand, usually in response to an event. For example, CI/CD is generally a set-off when code is checked in a particular repository branch. Once the process is complete, the resources are made available.

Serverless CI/CD, a component of serverless Framework Pro, an improved version of the open-source serverless Framework, is one of the few CI/CD platforms that can run without a server. Serverless CI/CD is best for deploying apps that do not need a server and only work on AWS right now. You must assess whether it adequately supports your application for use.

Conclusion:

iVedha, a NextGen software-powered global professional services and managed services provider with over a decade of industry presence in delivering end-to-end DevOps services and enabling CI/CD for our customers.

iVedha DevOps delivers development services that assist teams with work planning, code development collaboration, and application construction and deployment. Using our DevOps Services, you may work in the cloud. iVedha Pipelines offers services that facilitate continuous delivery and integration. Get a free consultation with our experts.