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There are multiple choices when selecting a CI/CD tool for your company. Independent websites such as G2 can assist in getting an understanding of which devices have what essential features. Even so, it may still be challenging to ascertain whether a product meets your requirements or conforms with industry rules.
In this blog article, we outline where TeamCity fits within this paradigm and offer essential guidance in confidently selecting a CI/CD solution suited for your company. It will aid your search for an ideal tool.
Selecting The Best Ci/Cd Tool For Your Requirements And Objectives
Teams may have vastly differing requirements when it comes to continuous integration/continuous deployment solutions; therefore, a technology that works well for one couple might not prove applicable to another.
Here are seven essential considerations when selecting an IT change and control solution for your organization.
Development workflow. Integrate it easily into your development processes without writing additional scripts or plugins.
Pipeline configuration. A comprehensive tool should provide adaptable configuration options that adapt to environments, security audits, and approval processes to facilitate an orderly transfer of artifacts and dependencies between development stages.
Feedback and analysis. CI/CD solutions should provide detailed feedback from error messages to infrastructure performance analysis to facilitate timely issue resolution and ensure continuous delivery processes.
Scalability and maintenance. Switching tools may take months of hard work, so you must select one that meets all your current and future requirements.
Security. Combatting hostile actors who seek to access or modify your source code, gain entry to your system, or falsify final products is of utmost importance.
Cost efficiency. Consider operating, maintenance, and license or subscription costs when analyzing continuous integration/delivery systems.
Usability and support. Every CI/CD developer should understand how their project is developed and deployed and how to use continuous delivery tools more quickly to implement changes rapidly - even if this is their first experience working in such an environment.
Hosting model. Your decision regarding a self-hosted or cloud solution depends entirely on the unique requirements of your business. It is best made after carefully considering each choice's benefits and drawbacks.
All contemporary systems offer essential features such as code configuration, Docker support, and the capability of automatically creating pull requests - characteristics that might matter less for smaller projects. As your team expands and your workflow becomes increasingly complicated, setting up pipelines appropriately can become challenging - your experience with various CI/CD tools may differ significantly when managing such scenarios.
Read more: 7 Key Benefits Of CI/CD: How Implementing CI/CD Save Your Business?
Development Workflow
Assessing continuous integration tools involves considering their flexibility in terms of workflow and how your team may need to modify procedures to accommodate them when making your selection decision. Consider these elements when doing this evaluation:
Diversity Of Your Change Workflows
Your team may require the ability to build all pull requests that arrive, launch the pipeline upon commits to specific branches, or trigger builds upon individual user updates to files in a particular directory. So as not to commit broken code and interfere with team efforts, occasionally running the build process without actually making changes is necessary to protect themselves and maintain project continuity. Your code could reside within one repository or multiple version control systems (VCSs), requiring frequent rebuilds and redeploys as external dependencies like Maven packages and Docker containers are updated. Assure your team finds a CI/CD solution suitable to their workflow by carefully considering its support of unique change workflows.
Docker And Non-Docker Workflows
Docker offers an effective and practical method of creating applications; however, in certain circumstances, an OS-based process might be more appropriate than Docker for making them. An OS process might be necessary if your program relies on accessing inaccessible hardware from within a container environment like Docker.
Docker-based approaches may only meet some of your team's requirements if your software must interact directly with an operating system - like when creating system drivers or Windows services. Before selecting an ideal continuous integration (CI) solution for your team, evaluate its specific needs as part of an assessment project and weigh any possible advantages or disadvantages of each strategy.
Team Maturity
Teams new to continuous integration may be more flexible when adapting their process for specific solutions, meaning users may benefit from products with limited adjustable options for more accessible and straightforward user experiences.
DevOps systems that offer all-encompassing coverage may prove too restrictive for experienced teams that understand their specific requirements, as these solutions lack enough customization or flexibility to meet those demands.
Ease Of Migration
Ease of migration should be one of the primary considerations when choosing a CI/CD tool, especially when switching from complete DevOps platforms to solo solutions is typically easier and causes less disruption to development workflows; users can migrate in batches while you write less manual integration code.
Organizational Aspects
Your organization's culture and standards must always be considered, particularly if teams are encouraged to select their development tools. Remind team members that changes can cause friction if they feel comfortable using the tools.
Pipeline Configuration
Every team has different requirements and workflows; therefore, their CI/CD tool must meet them and be fully customized to their unique needs. Below is an outline of all of the pipeline configuration options you should consider when making this choice.
UI And Code-Based Configuration
Since pipelines can be established without needing to acquire specific knowledge, certain solutions provide a user interface-based configuration technique, making getting up and running and managing setup easy. You can create an organized configuration history by employing all modern technologies that support configuration as code.
Many tools utilize YAML configuration files as a relatively straightforward means for automating the development and testing of essential applications. However, as your team or infrastructure grows more complex, managing them becomes increasingly challenging. Implementing continuous integration/continuous deployment using a programming language with loops, conditional statements, and other language features could prove more efficient for large projects. Furthermore, writing setup code in an IDE simplifies this method when combined with its debugging and refactoring features.
Workflow Customization
Continuous integration and delivery software customization are paramount, enabling teams to design pipelines tailored precisely to their build and deployment processes. Teams may wish to modify the build environment, testing scope, Docker image tag, and other pipeline elements based on trigger events like code commits, dependency updates, and scheduled triggers. Your chosen tool must allow for precise configuration to carry out various actions sequentially on one build agent (for instance, starting a Windows service and then performing a build simultaneously on that machine).
Environment Configuration
When selecting your CI/CD solution. Teams need the freedom to choose an environment of hybrid servers, bare metal servers, cloud build agents, or Docker containers that best meet their requirements.
Pipeline Optimization
Teams can speed up build times by employing various optimization strategies, as described above in the section on scalability. Caching dependencies is an invaluable way of shortening build times by eliminating the need to download and install dependencies every time a build runs. Since previously built components can also be reused later on, caching dependencies help significantly cut build times while increasing the reusability of build artifacts two strategies which further help cut build times.
An effective strategy to optimize pipelines in large projects is parallelizing testing across several build agents. Teams may quickly detect errors by spreading tests over multiple build agents, reducing the time spent running all tests simultaneously.
Artifact Management
Artifact creation and propagation are keys for any CI/CD pipeline's successful operation; your builds need to communicate data amongst themselves through these artifacts. Select a tool with artifact storage capabilities to preserve the information produced from your builds for further study and troubleshooting.
Final Thoughts
Your organization's decision on an ideal CI/CD tool depends on several considerations. Here, we outline key aspects you may want to keep in mind while searching for one to fit with your group or company. Please feel free to ask questions or post comments in the section provided below; we would love to respond and answer them all as quickly as possible. Contact us as we are the best CI/CD Consulting Company.
