DevOps: what are the best continuous integration tools
One of the major requirements for the implementation of Continuous Integration is the utilization of the Continuous Integration tools also known as build servers. While there are many Continuous Integration tools, there are some that are more widely used. Choosing the right Continuous Integration tool for your purposes can be a bit troublesome, especially when you want to start using them for the first time. So, we hope the below list will provide you with the quick and easy preview of the features and possibilities of some of the most widely used Continuous Integration tools in the market.
Jenkins: Jenkins is an open source Continuous Integration tool. It is originated as the fork of Hudson when Oracle bought the Sun Microsystems. Jenkins is a cross-platform tool and it offers configuration through GUI interface and console commands. Jenkins provides Continuous Integration services for software development. It is a server based system running in a servlet container such as Apache-Tomcat. It is developed in Java and can be installed using simple java – jar jenkins.war command after downloading the WAR file. Jenkins mainly focuses on two major jobs that are – building or testing software projects continuously and monitors externally-running jobs. Jenkins is very flexible because of the feature plugins. The plugin list is very extensive and a developer can easily add his own plugin. Besides extensibility, Jenkins prides itself on distributing builds and test loads on multiple machines. Jenkins is published under MIT license so it free to use and distribute.
Go: Go is the latest cruise control incarnation from ThoughtWorks. Eliminating the commercial support that ThoughtWorks offer, Go is free of cost. Go is available for windows, Mac, and other Linux distributions. Go also lets a developer to distribute his builds across different systems and monitors them all in one place. To use this, a developer needs to install it on his server. There is no SaaS available for Go. What makes Go stand out of the crowd is the concept of pipelines. The pipelines concept makes the modelling of the complex build workflows easy. Another interesting factor of Go is it has the ability to visualize the entire continuous delivery workflow with the value stream map. The map helps a developer to track the entire change from commit to deployment.
Bamboo: Bamboo is a continuous integration server from Atlassian, the makers of JIRA, Confluence, and Crowd. Bamboo tools come in two versions. The cloud and the server. If the user wants to go with the cloud version of Bamboo, Atlassian will host the Bamboo to the user and the user needs to have Amazon EC2 account. If the server is the user’s preferred choice, then the user will host his/her own instance of the Bamboo server.
Conclusion: There are many CI tools available out there, in which we have different tools that suits different environments and users. At the end of the day to choose the right tool for your project, you need to have a clear knowledge of tools. We hope in this article we have given you a brief introduction about different tools available for CI to help you to investigate further.