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 CI/CD tools to use 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 provides Infrastructure-as-code(IaC) and workflow automation from a trusted developer. Many users swear by Terraform, so it has an active community that makes finding information about different scenarios much easier.
• Kubernetes is the container orchestration platform for container deployment, so much that the platform is synonymous with the concept. It adapts well with many programs, and being open source, there are countless variations to fit different business scenarios.
• Docker is a platform-as-a-Service(PaaS) container system that works well with others. These are the original container creators, who still provide some of the best container-related services like Docker Swarm for CI/CD.
• Chef is a ontinuous delivery pipeline automation tool for varying environments, which provides superior automation tools for scaling workloads quickly.
• Puppet offers continuous delivery that scales well to the enterprise level. This is achieved by making it easy for users to create automated pipelines with rules to govern them.
• Ansible provides hybrid cloud automation for DevOps with work management mixed in with high-level analytics. It is ideal for small to mid-sized teams working in a fast-paced development cycle.
• Vagrant provides VM environments for faster setup times and production parity in an open source package that is accessible to everyone. Users can reproduce and tweak pipelines that work until they’ve discovered the most efficient combinations for each task.
• SaltStack is a modern automation and infrastructure management tool with an active open source community that makes it easy for users to hit the ground running. It offers configuration management and remote execution via the command line.
• Microsoft DSC is Powershell’s ‘Desired State Configuration’ tool for fast setups and rapid testing. Windows users can save their working configurations without any extra downloads, as DSC is built into the operating system.
• AWS CloudFormation is used to expedite cloud provisioning using IaC and Amazon S3. Expect this tool to work as well with AWS as any produced by Amazon.
• TravisCI is a platform that provides ontinuous deployment, multi-environment testing, and multi-language builds. It is one of the most trusted platforms for expedient QA in CI/CD.
• Capastriano is a remote server automation and deployment tool that can deploy in any language. Its value is found in scripting and automation features, but also in its versatility in helping with different types of remote deployment tasks.

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!