Useful CI/CD Tools for DevOps
DevOps tools that define the state of today’s software CI/CD automation:
Azure DevOps
Docker
GitHub Actions
Terraform
Spacelift
1. Azure DevOps
• Azure DevOps by Microsoft is an all-in-one CI/CD platform that features entire software delivery in one place. As the name suggests, it is more than just a CI/CD tool. Below are some of its features.
• Azure Repos – It is a cloud-hosted private Git repository service. Azure Repos enables team collaboration by providing features like branching, tagging, pull requests, etc., which are essential.
• Azure Boards – Epics and stories that are created in a backlog and made part of the sprints required for agile software delivery are supported by Azure Boards. Azure Boards make it possible to coordinate team efforts.
• Azure Pipelines – Azure Pipelines enable the CI/CD automation of the software being developed. It can be integrated with any remote Git repository and not just Azure Repos.
• Azure Artifacts – Software artifacts like binaries, packages, and files, often need secure storage and enforcement of the right access controls so that only the required automation workflows use these artifacts.
• Azure Test Plans – Azure Test Plans offer a great set of tools to run tests on various combinations of host OS and browser suites, and enable end-to-end traceability of bugs. It provides a great UI to showcase indicators like test coverage.
There are many containerization tools available in the market, but Docker has stood the test of time. Docker is used to build application images run in standalone mode on virtual machines or in a cluster as pods.
Docker’s architecture is mainly divided into three parts. First, the Docker CLI is used to interact with the Docker daemon, which is a process that builds, manages, and runs Docker images.
The built images are stored in remote repositories, from where the CI/CD workflows fetch them for deployment purposes.
3. GitHub Actions
• Any source control system mainly has two parts – local Git to manage the code versions locally and remote repository to enable team collaboration.
GitHub has been around for a long time and is a crucial part of the source code management systems available for free on the internet. It acts as a global remote repository for anyone who wants to develop in any language or framework.
• GitHub Actions is a CI/CD platform integrated within GitHub repositories and available for all the repositories one may have.
• Once the code is pushed or merged in a GitHub repo, the same event is used to trigger build and deploy pipelines.
4. Terraform
• Managing cloud infrastructure manually to host any product or service manually is tedious and risky. Terraform is an Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tool by Hashicorp that provides automation capabilities for infrastructure.
• Terraform uses HCL (Hashicorp Configuration Language) to express the infrastructure in the form of code and manage the end-to-end lifecycle of cloud resources.
5.
Spacelift
Spacelift provides a platform to manage IaC in an automated, easy, controlled, and secure manner. We touched upon remote backends in the last section. Spacelift goes above and beyond the support that is offered by the plain backend system.