39 Tools for Building your CI/CD Stack
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If there’s one thing you have in application development, it’s choice. A whole lot of choice. Use these CI/CD tools to make the transition a little easier. Here’s a brief guide to some of the top tools being used to develop CI/CD ecosystems.
CI Framework
Jenkins is a “CI Framework” that wants to be at the center of your CI/CD software development efforts. Using a CI Framework, you can create hourly or daily builds automatically, run your unit tests and also deploy builds to your QA or production environment. Jenkins has quickly come to dominate CI/CD builds and there is no reason to believe that that will change in the near future.
Software type: Open Source
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Build automation
Maven is more or less a standard for building Java projects now, taking over older build automation systems like Ant. While there could be a crossover with some of the functionality of CI Frameworks like Jenkins, there are still good reasons to have a standalone build automation system.
Software type: Open Source
Gradle has come a long way in a short time, and has built a growing legion of fans, who have found this to be a slicker and faster build automation service than Maven. Some of its proponents include tech luminaries like Netflix, Google and LinkedIn.
Software type: Open Source
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Issue and project tracking
JIRA from Atlassian has become pretty dominant in issue and project tracking for agile development. While smaller operations may get away with something like Trello for an online Kanban/Scrum board, the flexible and grown-up feature set of JIRA has made it popular with agile aficionados. Importantly, its growing body of plug-ins makes it a likely fit with many CI/CD stacks — and increasingly makes JIRA the platform and focal point for many development operations.
Software type: Commercial
- CA Agile Central (formerly Rally)
Rally was recently bought by CA Technologies, which subsequently re-branded it CA Agile Central. This speaks to the ambitions of the parent company, as they want to make it the focal point of your agile development project management. Although “Rally” was a mainstay of agile dev project management, the acquisition and re-brand may make or break the system.
Software type: Commercial
Also check out:
- VersionOne
- Team Foundation Server
- HPE Agile Manager
Continuous delivery
Chef aims to encapsulate a series of processes, tests and automations to allow you to continuously deliver finished applications to market. It reinforces best practices, DevOps style.
Software type: Freemium
- Puppet (formerly Puppet Labs)
In their own words: “Our platform is the industry standard for automating the delivery and operation of the software that powers everything around us. More than 30,000 companies – including more than two thirds of the Fortune 100 – use Puppet’s open source and commercial solutions to achieve situational awareness and drive software change with confidence.”
Software type: Freemium
Electric Cloud’s ElectricFlow aims to provide “shared visibility and control over enterprise DevOps tools and CD pipelines”
Software type: Freemium
In this post, we’ve tried to cover some of the major tools that we’re seeing and recommending for a CI/CD stack. Inevitably, this isn’t a definitive list and there are a lot more tools and services that we could include. To round this out, here are a few other notable development and testing tools that could or should make the cut:
Test Management
- QMetry Test Manager
- HPE Quality Center Enterprise
- ApTest
Test Automation
Repository management
Code coverage
Behavior Driven Development
Application performance monitoring
Application security testing
- HPE Fortify
Cloud management
Mobile Device clouds
- Perfecto
- Sauce Labs
We hope this is a useful starting point. And if you need more hands-on guidance in your transition to CI/CD, drop us a note here.
