DevOps: CI/CD Tools

As continuous integration/continuous development, or CI/CD continues to become more necessary for developers to compete, the matter of which tools becomes more important than ever. Efficiency is the name of the game, since pushing features quickly is both a measure of beating out the competition and keeping current consumers happy with updates. 

But there are other considerations for finding the best CI/CD tools. You might find the container management of one tool lacks the automation of another, or you might find a third tool allows them to work together. As any developer will attest, a pipeline can be any combination of mechanics and automations, as long as expediency isn’t compromising the quality of deployment.

Effective CI/CD Tools

Every good developer is only made better by using the right tools, even if that means finding tools that work with your current favorites. The list below is a collection of effective CI/CD tools–particularly in cloud-based development–and a brief description of their purpose:

• Terraform by HashiCorp – Infrastructure-as-code(IaC) and workflow automation
• Kubernetes – The top orchestrated container management system for automated deployment
• Docker – A platform-as-a-Service(PaaS) container system that works well with others
• Chef – Continuous delivery pipeline automation tools for varying environments
• Puppet – Continuous delivery that scales well to the enterprise level
• Ansible – Hybrid cloud automation for DevOps with a good offering of analytics
• Vagrant – VM environments for for faster setup times and production parity
• SaltStack – Modern automation and infrastructure management with an active open source community 
• Microsoft DSC – Powershell’s ‘Desired State Configuration’ tool for fast setups and rapid testing
• AWS Cloudformation – Expedite cloud provisioning using IaC and Amazon S3
• TravisCI – Continuous deployment, multi-environment testing, and multi-language builds
• Capastriano – A remote server automation and deployment tool that can deploy in any language

This list isn’t comprehensive, but examples of the best for specific categories. For instance, there are many other container management platforms besides Docker and Kubernetes, but these two are the most used for a reason. For lesser-known variants that don’t make the top five lists, you might still find a solution that fits perfectly within your development toolset.

Finding Expert Help for Cloud-Based CI/CD 

We consider all these factors in the tools we use to optimize cloud infrastructure. Current practitioners can use it to find alternatives to your own methods, or perhaps extend your expertise with help from specialists. 

FogOps Experts are masters of the cloud-based infrastructure required to instill CI/CD properly in any system on AWS, Azure, or GCP. If you’d like to go further into specifics about how managed services can bridge the gap, we provide these services that are directly related to CI/CD:  

• DevOps & Infrastructure Automation Services
• Azure DevOps Services
• FogOps Cloud Engineering On Demand
• Containerization Strategy – Orchestration & Consulting

You can follow the links for more information, or contact a FogOps Expert directly by clicking the button below!