In today’s fast-paced digital landscape, the ability to deliver software quickly and reliably is paramount. At Digital Architects Zurich, we understand the critical role that Continuous Integration (CI), Continuous Delivery (CD), and Continuous Verification (CV) play in achieving this goal. Our recent benchmark study provides valuable insights into the effectiveness of various CI/CD and CV tools. This blog post will walk you through our evaluation approach, the structure of our benchmark, and the benefits it offers to our customers.
Overview of the Benchmark and Its Benefits
Our benchmark study aims to provide a vendor-neutral evaluation of CI/CD and CV tools, ensuring that organizations can make informed decisions based on their unique needs. By assessing tools across multiple layers (details further below), we offer a holistic view of their capabilities, strengths, and areas for improvement. The primary benefits of our benchmark include:
- Objective Evaluation: Our vendor-neutral approach ensures that the evaluation is unbiased and based solely on the tools’ performance and features.
- Comprehensive Insights: By examining tools across various layers, we provide a detailed understanding of their capabilities, helping organizations choose the best fit for their requirements.
- Improved Decision-Making: With clear insights into the strengths and weaknesses of each tool, organizations can make informed decisions that align with their strategic goals.
Our extensive experience with CI, CD and CV solutions at large enterprises has significantly enhanced our evaluation process. By implementing a broad set of solutions in diverse and complex environments, we have gained valuable insights into their performance, scalability, and integration capabilities. This hands-on experience has enabled us to conduct a thorough and practical assessment. In addition, publicly available resources were reviewed to understand the features and capabilities of the solutions.
The benchmark adopts a weighted evaluation method, considering the significance of each capability and layer (see layer descriptions below). This approach ensures a balanced and comprehensive assessment and allows us to customize the benchmark to a specific situation.
Description of the Most Important Categories of Each Layer
Our benchmark study evaluates tools across several critical layers, each with its own set of capabilities. Here, we highlight the respective key capabilities and their significance:
Continuous Integration (CI)
- Multi-Branch Based Builds: The ability to build multiple branches simultaneously is crucial for parallel development and faster integration.
- Dependency Update: Effective management of dependencies, including support for various package managers and semantic versioning, ensures smooth and reliable builds.
- Integration of Checks and Scans: Integrating quality checks and security scans within the CI pipeline enhances code quality and reduces vulnerabilities.
Continuous Verification (CV)
- Test Optimization: Optimizing the order of tests at various levels (unit, unit-integration, application) based on failure rates and test duration improves efficiency and reduces feedback time.
- ML-Based Validation: Leveraging machine learning to validate test results and analyze observability data provides deeper insights into application performance and reliability.
- Test Coverage Analysis: Comprehensive analysis of test coverage at various levels ensures that all critical code paths are tested, reducing the risk of undetected issues.
Continuous Delivery (CD)
- Deployment Strategies: Support for advanced deployment strategies such as canary releases or blue-green deployments minimizes downtime and reduces deployment risks.
- Provisioning Integration: Seamless integration with infrastructure provisioning tools like Terraform and AWS CloudFormation ensures consistent and reliable deployments.
- Approval Integration: Embedding manual approvals within the CD pipeline or integrating with external systems like Jira ensures compliance and governance.
Pipelining
- Governance: Governance is essential for maintaining security, quality, and efficiency. It ensures compliance with regulatory standards, enforces consistent practices, and provides accountability through clear audit trails.
- As Code Support: The “as code” approach enhances consistency, version control, automation, scalability, and collaboration, leading to more efficient and reliable software delivery.
- Pipeline Optimization: Optimizing improves efficiency, resource utilization, and developer productivity, leading to faster and more reliable software delivery. It ensures high-quality code reaches production quickly.
- Reusable Pipelines: Supports reusable pipelines through templates and child pipelines, allowing to improve maintainability.
Benchmarked Tools
We benchmarked the following tools (listed here in alphabetic order):
ArgoCD with Argo Workflows
ArgoCD is a declarative continuous delivery tool for Kubernetes. It automates application deployments by ensuring infrastructure aligns with Git repositories, making it essential for modern DevOps practices. ArgoCD can be used as a standalone tool or as part of a CI/CD workflow. Argo Workflows is an open-source container-native workflow engine for orchestrating parallel jobs on Kubernetes. It models workflows as a directed acyclic graph (DAG) and is designed to be lightweight, scalable, and easy to use for complex workflows.
Codefresh
Codefresh is a cloud-native continuous integration and delivery platform designed for cloud-native applications. It supports multiple pipelines per project, central GitOps support, and is built around Argo solutions. Codefresh is known for its strong CD capabilities and focuses on microservices and containers.
GitHub Actions
GitHub Actions is a continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) platform that allows you to automate your build, test, and deployment pipeline directly from your GitHub repository. It supports creating custom workflows and integrates seamlessly with GitHub.
GitLab Ultimate
GitLab Ultimate is a DevOps platform that offers a single, scalable interface for organization-wide DevSecOps. It includes advanced security capabilities, compliance, portfolio management, and value stream management. GitLab Ultimate helps in reducing handoffs across tools and teams, improving efficiencies, and delivering better products faster.
Harness Platform (CI/CD/CV)
Harness is a comprehensive platform that provides many capabilities around the software delivery life cycle. It simplifies the code development and testing process, automates software delivery, and integrates with various tools for feature management, cloud cost management, and security testing.
Jenkins/CloudBees
Jenkins is an open-source automation server that manages and controls software delivery processes throughout the entire lifecycle. CloudBees CI is an enterprise solution built on top of Jenkins, offering enhanced scalability, manageability, and performance for large-scale enterprises.
The Benefits of Engaging with Digital Architects Zurich
Engaging with Digital Architects Zurich for your CI/CD and CV needs offers several key benefits:
- Expertise and Experience: Our team of experts brings extensive experience in evaluating and implementing CI/CD and CV solutions, ensuring that you receive the best possible guidance and support.
- Market Understanding: Our understanding of the major solutions in the CI/CD and CV space stems from our experience of best-practice implementations at large-scale clients.
- Tailored Solutions: We understand that every organization is unique, and we tailor our recommendations to meet your specific needs and goals.
In conclusion, our Continuous Delivery Platform Benchmark provides a comprehensive and objective evaluation of CI/CD and CV tools, helping organizations make informed decisions and achieve their software delivery goals. Partner with Digital Architects Zurich to unlock the full potential of your CI/CD and CV processes and stay ahead in the competitive digital landscape.
Get in Touch to Learn More
Please let us know if you have comments or would like to understand how we support you with your CI/CD or Continuous Verification project. Leveraging our skills for culture-first transformation consulting, paired with our expertise to upskill organizations through proven training, and our engineering capabilities, we can ensure the success of your transformation journey.
Write us to: info@digital-architects-zurich.ch