CI/CD tools: A guide to orchestration, testing, and deployment toolkit

Continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) are core DevOps practices that help teams accelerate releases, cut development costs, and reduce manual labor. As the demand for effective pipeline automation and management grows, choosing the right CI/CD tools becomes decisive to an enterprise’s operational success. In fact, with the global CI/CD solutions market projected to grow at a CAGR of 20% until 2028, now is the time to discover key tools that can streamline your development.

So, which CI/CD solutions are the right choices for their respective functions? Which features should you look for when selecting tools for CI/CD? Read on to discover our experts’ selections and recommendations.

The main categories of DevOps CI/CD pipeline tools

CI is an approach where code changes are merged into a central repository frequently and automatically as soon as they are validated, simplifying version control and streamlining development. Meanwhile, CD focuses on automating the release process, quickly bringing these changes and updates to customers. To build effective and resilient CI/CD pipelines, each of these approaches requires specialized tools that handle the associated tasks. Let’s review the main categories such solutions fall into.

Orchestration

CI/CD orchestration tools are necessary to coordinate the entire testing and deployment process. They help build pipelines by automating the process of defining job configurations, the sequence of stages, and the tasks to be executed. An orchestrator can significantly increase development speed, streamline processes, and improve application reliability.

Static code analysis

Static code analysis tools work as spell checkers for code. They examine your code and identify errors, quality issues, and potential vulnerabilities without executing it. Such tools help maintain high code quality and catch problems as early as possible.

Building the code

CI/CD solutions for development form a broad category, but they most commonly focus on building the code and managing dependencies. They help you with tasks like compiling, packaging, and preparing the application for deployment.

Testing

Extensive testing is one of the pillars of CI/CD that minimizes bugs, errors, and vulnerabilities that reach production. Engineers use these tools for:

• Unit testing to validate separate components or modules;
• Integration testing to check whether components work together correctly;
• API testing to confirm that all API’s endpoints and methods work as expected;
• UI testing to verify that the user interface functions properly;
• Performance testing to determine how stable and responsive the application is.

Deployment

While the previous categories are geared toward CI, tools that streamline deployment belong to the continuous delivery stage. They automate code release to production, accelerating this process by minimizing manual intervention and ensuring consistent updates.

What features should you seek when selecting CI/CD tools?

The best CI/CD pipeline tools are the ones that cover your requirements precisely and effectively. To find a fit for your project, N-iX DevOps engineers start with understanding your needs and setup, subsequently conducting a proof of concept (PoC) before making the final selection. At the same time, there are often multiple solutions available that correspond to similar requirements, programming languages, and environments. So, how do you choose among them? In this section, our experts share several key features and capabilities to look for when selecting tools for CI/CD.

Automated code integration

To prevent last-minute integration issues, choose the tools that continuously and automatically merge code changes from different developers. For example, if your team uses Git, an orchestrator like Jenkins can detect new code pushes and automatically pull the changes, run tests, and merge into the main branch.

Streamlined deployment across multiple environments

Simplified deployment across development, testing, and production environments while maintaining consistency is an important outcome of using reliable CI/CD solutions. To achieve this, pick the tools that allow you to define deployment configurations once and automatically apply them across multiple environments, among other features.

Cloud-native support

Cloud-native support is paramount to ensure your chosen solutions seamlessly integrate with cloud services. This consideration can particularly influence your choice if you already have an investment in a specific cloud platform.

Compatibility with development tools and platforms

Tools that integrate with common IDEs, cloud platforms, and third-party solutions streamline development, facilitate automation, and make deployments more reliable. On the other hand, a CI/CD solution that’s disjointed from your development ecosystem can result in a fragmented workflow, leading to bottlenecks and inefficiencies.

Top 5 CI/CD tools for orchestration

1. GitHub Actions

GitHub Actions is an excellent fit for engineering teams that use GitHub for version control. This tool features a native GitHub integration that simplifies pull requests, access to repositories, and operations with issues. For instance, when N-iX helped a large insurance corporation migrate to AWS, our team used GitHub Actions to smoothly move on-premises resources to GitHub on AWS. It allowed us to automate, customize, and execute development workflows directly in the repository.

Here are several key features of GitHub Actions:

• Matrix builds that streamline testing across different operating systems and runtime versions;
• Live logs that allow you to observe your workflow run in real time;
• Multi-language support including .NET, Node.js, Java, Python, Ruby, PHP, and more.

2. GitLab

GitLab is another orchestrator that can be easily connected to an external GitHub repository. It’s a comprehensive tool that enables teams to automate the entire CI/CD pipeline—from sourcing and building to testing and deploying—without leaving the platform.

The main GitLab features include:

• AutoDevOps that simplifies CI/CD pipeline setup with automatic language detection and pre-configured templates;
• DevSecOps that integrates security scans and other measures into every stage of the pipeline;
• Self-hosted runners support that allows you to manage servers or machines to run CI/CD jobs for tighter resource control.

3. Jenkins

Jenkins is one of the most widely used open-source orchestrators for CI/CD building, testing, and deployment. It’s free to use, suitable for diverse development environments, and highly flexible.

Here are several features that make Jenkins stand out:

• Extensive plugin support that enables seamless integration with version control solutions, deployment platforms, and other third-party tools;
• Pipeline as code functionality that removes the need for manual job creation and management;
• Active community that helps resolve issues rapidly and contributes to a large pool of resources, tutorials, and guides.

4. Bamboo

Bamboo is a CI server offered by Atlassian that helps you automate CI pipelines. As part of the Atlassian ecosystem, it comes with native Jira and Bitbucket integrations. It also features an intuitive user interface that simplifies pipeline setup and other operations.

Bamboo’s key features include:

• In-built disaster recovery and Opsgenie integration that help achieve high availability, build resilience, and respond to incidents quickly;
• Built-in integration with Jira and Bitbucket that provides you with full traceability across all development stages;
• Dedicated agents that allow you to assign build agents to run only specific builds, optimizing resource usage.

5. CircleCI

CircleCI is an orchestration tool that centers around simplicity and speed for DevOps teams, using intelligent caching and parallelism to decrease build times and streamline delivery. It also easily integrates with major cloud platforms, including AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP), as well as with testing tools like Postman and Grafana k6.

Several core features of CircleCI include:

• SSH debugging that allows you to debug directly in the build environment;
• Advanced performance monitoring tools that help identify and mitigate bottlenecks;
• Private orbs that enable teams to create sharable, standardized configurations that can be used across the organization.

Top selection for static code analysis: SonarQube

Our experts recommend SonarQube as a leading tool to ensure code quality and security in CI/CD. It’s a static code analysis solution that detects bugs and vulnerabilities early in the development cycle. With support for multiple languages, it’s a great tool that helps you produce clean and maintainable code for virtually any project.

Let’s take a look at several features that make SonarQube stand out among other static code analysis tools for CI/CD pipeline.

• Automated code reviews identify security issues before code reaches production;
• Quality gates promote compliance with coding standards and prevent code that doesn’t meet the defined criteria from being deployed;
• Multi-language support enables you to analyze code in Java, JavaScript, Python, and other languages, all in one platform;
• CI/CD integration with tools like Jenkins and GitLab ensures seamless communication between these solutions.

3 CI/CD tools for code building

1. Yarn

Yarn is a reliable package manager for JavaScript, specifically designed for use in Node.js projects. When building CI/CD pipelines, Yarn is useful for automating dependency management and optimizing build processes. It also supports parallel installation and offers deterministic builds. The latter, in particular, is crucial for successful CI/CD since it ensures consistency regardless of library versions used, as well as other varying steps in the process, such as downloading data from external sources.

2. Maven

Maven is a widely used Java build and dependency manager. Essentially, it allows you to build solutions while managing dependencies, compiling code, and packaging applications. It uses a declarative XML-based configuration, making builds predictable and reproducible. It also supports a wide range of plugins to automate tasks like testing, reporting, and deployment.

3. Gradle

Gradle is a flexible build tool for Java, Kotlin, and Groovy projects. It automates the development cycle with incremental builds, parallel execution, and a rich plugin ecosystem. It also features declarative build scripts and dependency management, making it a powerful choice among CI/CD tools for development.

Top testing tools to use in CI/CD

Unit testing

• JUnit is an easy-to-use testing tool for Java that features annotations, assertions, and test runners support. It’s effective in reducing manual testing and test failure rates. For instance, N-iX implemented JUnit to automate frontend and backend testing when enhancing development processes for a global shipping company. You can also integrate JUnit with IntelliJ IDEA, Eclipse, NetBeans, and other Java-geared development environments.
• NUnit is a testing framework for the .NET platforms and languages that enables QA engineers to write tests, add relevant metadata attributes, and execute sets of unit tests related to a specific feature. It’s also easy to integrate NUnit with Visual Studio, Xamarin, and other third-party apps via API.
• Mocha is a JavaScript testing framework that offers extensive browser support, asynchronous test running, and test retry support. It also allows testers to use any assertion library, such as Chai, should.js, expect.js, and better-assert.
• Pytest is a flexible Python testing framework with broad plugin and fixture support that makes it easy to reuse test setups. It also offers parameterized tests, built-in assertions, and seamless integrations with frameworks like Django and Flask.

Integration testing

• Testcontainers is a Java library that lets you conduct integration testing with real services but without the risk of breaking your production database. It allows you to run Docker containers during testing, simulating databases, message brokers, and other services without affecting your actual production environment.
• Citrus is designed to test messaging protocols (HTTP, JMS, SOAP, Kafka, etc.), making it ideal for API and microservices integration testing. It can simulate both client and server behaviors, enabling comprehensive testing of service interactions.

API testing

• Postman started off as a Chrome browser plugin and evolved into one of the most widely used API testing tools on the market. It offers a multitude of diverse features, including automated testing support, request chaining, and built-in JavaScript scripting.
• REST Assured is an open-source Java framework designed for testing RESTful APIs. It offers a straightforward setup process, JSON and XML support, and built-in response validation methods.
• Katalon Studio is a flexible API testing tool that supports REST and SOAP requests, automated assertions, and parallel test execution. It integrates with continuous integration pipelines and provides built-in reporting to help QA engineers with comprehensive test analysis.

UI testing

• Selenium is currently one of the best CI/CD pipeline tools for UI testing, and it’s earned its place with robust multi-browser compatibility, support for multiple languages, and parallel test execution.
• Cypress is a comprehensive UI testing tool that offers an intuitive interface, fast execution, and built-in debugging. It runs directly in the browser and provides real-time results for reliable end-to-end testing.

Performance testing

• Gatling is a performance testing tool that simulates high concurrent user loads efficiently using asynchronous, non-blocking architecture. You can also streamline test script development by using Gatling with any chosen integrated development environment (IDE) like IntelliJ IDEA.
• Grafana k6 is a highly extensible and easily integrated performance and load testing tool. It offers live test result analysis, development of custom plugins, and configurable load generation.

Top tool for deployment: Terraform

When it comes to the continuous deployment portion of the CI/CD, our experts’ top selection is Terraform. Terraform is an infrastructure as code (IaC) solution that helps automatically deploy and manage cloud and on-premises infrastructures. It allows you to create an infrastructure with a single pipeline, achieving faster, repeatable deployments. It also offers declarative configuration that allows you to specify the desired state of infrastructure rather than how to create it, making deployments more predictable.

Another advantage of Terraform is its multi-cloud support, which made it the best choice for one of our projects. The N-iX team was building a unified data platform on AWS for a Fortune 500 industrial supply company, and developing a cloud agnostic strategy was a priority. Terraform’s compatibility with AWS, Azure, and GCP ensured that the client could continue deploying seamlessly, even if they switched cloud providers in the future.

Let’s review a brief summary of features that make Terraform a great tool for deployment.

• The declarative configuration ensures consistency, reduces the chance of human error, and prevents duplicates;
• Continuous tracking of the state of your infrastructure ensures deployments match the desired configuration;
• The execution plan that Terraform generates before applying changes allows you to preview and validate deployments, avoiding surprises further down the line;
• Automatic resource dependency handling manages the order of operations.

Wrapping up

CI/CD tools are the machinery that helps you build, automate, and manage pipelines. The advantages you’ll be able to receive with CI/CD largely depend on how “well-oiled” these instruments are—both the tools’ quality and their suitability for your specific project play a part.

Gathering the right CI/CD toolkit and putting it to use can be a complicated and multifaceted task, but you don’t need to tackle it alone. A seasoned DevOps consultant can provide expert assistance at various stages in your CI/CD journey, whether you’re just getting started, scaling, or looking to integrate new technologies.

Why should you partner with N-iX to integrate CI/CD tools into your project?

• Over the past five years, our team of over 60 DevOps engineers and 400 certified cloud experts delivered more than 150 DevOps and cloud projects.
• N-iX DevOps engineers have extensive experience implementing Bamboo, GitLab, CircleCI, Terraform, Yarn, and other solutions to build CI/CD pipelines and automate deployment cycles.
• Our team has hands-on experience building CI/CD pipelines and providing DevOps services for a wide range of domains, including manufacturing, retail, telecom, fintech, healthcare, and supply chain.
• N-iX is a certified AWS Advanced Tier Services Partner, a Google Cloud Platform Partner, and a Microsoft Solutions Partner for Azure Infrastructure, which allows us to combine field-tested cloud strategies with industry best practices.
• We hold your security in the highest regard and comply with ISO 27001, PCI DSS, GDPR, and ISO 9001 to ensure robust protection for your data.