Most popular CI/CD pipelines and tools
By: Tony Eneh
Tags: Continuous Deployment, Continuous Delivery, Opinion, Continuous Integration, Software Development

Ever since Grady Booch coined the term Continuous Integration in his 1991 method, CI tools have been slowly taking over the workflow of programmers. However, 2011 saw the emergence of Jenkins from Oracles Hudson and hence marked a new era of wider community involvement as well as rapid adoption of tools and pipelines for Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery.

Lists like this are highly emotionally draining to write. In some instances, it could be hard making the keep/drop decision and the temptation would be to include everything includable. Lol! But if everything is popular that means none is popular. Without much ado here is my list of most popular CI/CD tools and pipelines in no particular order.

Travis CI:

This hosted CI-CD solution prides itself as the home of open source testing; its open-source home page travis-ci.org boldly states that it is home to over 900 thousand open-source projects and 600 thousand users. The wide popularity is largely because it is free to use for open-source projects. You can only pay when using it for private repositories. Travis CI itself is an open-sourced software. Its source code is available for free on GitHub. Jenkins: This is the open-source, standalone, free solution. It is written in java and runs in a web container. According to the Wikipedia CI/CD comparison article, it has support for the widest collection of different version control systems. Presently it can work with git, subversion, mercurial, perforce, BitKeeper, CVS, ClearCase, RTC(Rational Team Concert) and a host of others.

Secondly, the pipeline successfully runs an even wider selection of build automation tools like MSBuild, NAnt, Ant, Maven, Shell script, Groovy, Make, etc.

Downside: Unlike other pipelines listed here, it is the only one without an official hosting provided by its makers. This is quite understandable since it is a community-developed solution. Using it is however not a problem since most cloud hosting platforms offer out of the box support for Jenkins installation. This wide support and easy installation are why I termed Jenkins the Wordpress of Continuous Integration. Appveyor: This is a hosted service which can build, test and deploy projects on Windows and Ubuntu virtual environments. It supports the following build tools: Visual Studio, MSBuild, Psake, PowerShell, etc. It also integrates well with GitHub, Gitlab, Atlassian Bitbucket among other popular repositories. Though Appveyor supports Linux based projects, its been widely made popular by its strong Windows support and focus. Circle CI: This is another popular solution and just like Travis it is free to use for open-source projects. Its source code can also be downloaded from GitHub and self-hosted since it is itself an open-source project. It has wide support for GitHub, Bitbucket repos, as well as out of the box support adaptability to Amazon Web Services Virtual host. Semaphore CI: This is a proprietory but teeming solution. It has wide support for different programming languages and can run builders for Java, C/C++, Node.js, Go, Python, etc. The creators run a highly informative and well-written blog. This — in my opinion- has widely contributed to their increasing popularity. Gitlab CI: This is the continuous Integration offering by Gitlab Inc. Gitlab Inc also offers a hosted git repository with issue tracking similar to GitHub. Gitlab CI is released under the open-core development model, whereby the core functionality is released under an open-source license while added functionalities come with a proprietary license. It supports varied source building tools and test runners.

CONCLUSION

I know, I know. There are other ‘popular’ solutions like TeamCity, Bamboo, Buddy, and the open-sourced Buildbot. In the absence of publicly available statistical data, it is hard to gauge the popularity of these tools. What I have written here are my personal opinions and deductions.

However, if you feel a particular pipeline should have made it into my popularity list, I would love to hear you with a brief why in the comments.

image credit: edge.siriuscom.com

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