Continuous Integration Tools

Pillars of continuous integration

Continuous Integration (CI) is built on several key pillars that ensure the smooth and efficient integration of code changes during software development.

Version Control

Using a version control system like Git is foundational. Developers work in separate branches and merge changes frequently to avoid conflicts and ensure team-wide collaboration. Regular code reviews help ensure code quality, while continuous refinement of the CI pipeline improves efficiency over time.

Build automation

An automated build process should be triggered every time code is committed. This ensures the code is compiled, tested, and validated continuously without manual intervention. Immediate feedback loops, such as build status updates and notifications, help developers quickly identify issues and ensure a stable build.

Automated testing

Comprehensive automated testing (including unit, integration, and security tests) is crucial. Running these tests as part of the CI process allows teams to catch bugs early and maintain code quality.

Automated Deployments

Provide pre-built integrations and templates for popular tools and platforms to minimize the need for custom scripting. This allows teams to get up and running quickly without the overhead of extensive configuration and maintenance.

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Continuous Integration Tools Comparison

Harness CI

Harness CI is designed to accelerate your builds and tests, providing lightning-fast performance through intelligent caching and optimized cloud builds. With Harness' Test Intelligence, you can optimize your test execution, focusing on the most critical tests and reducing feedback cycle times. With Harness Cache Intelligence, Docker Layer Caching, and Build Intelligence, you can cache all the relevant parts of the build - software dependencies, docker layers, and build outputs. 

Jenkins

Jenkins is a very useful tool, and it does many things well. But ultimately, as you scale up, you start seeing the limitations of building anything on top of Jenkins in the form of maintenance, toil, and outages. 

When we discuss Jenkins, the most important things we want to highlight are the return on investment and total cost of ownership. If you’re a small company with a handful of services, Jenkins can be a great return on investment. However, when you start scaling up use cases, services, developers, and more, your return on each hour invested tends to decrease at an exponential rate. 

GitHub Actions

GitHub Actions is a continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) platform. It enables users to automate various GitHub events, such as cloning a repository, generating Docker images, and testing scripts. It will kick off workflows with GitHub events like push, issue creation, or a new release. For example, you can create a workflow to run automatically to add the appropriate labels whenever someone creates a new issue in your repository, or you can develop one to set environment variables whenever someone kicks off one or more jobs. Learn more about GitHub Actions' pros and cons.

GitLab CI

GitLab offers a thorough software delivery platform with a core open-sourced version and features that are available for purchase. GitLab would like to be the single source of truth for CI/CD at an organization. All the software delivery fundamentals exist here, but the tool lacks advanced governance features such as automatic verification and automatic rollbacks.

The difficulty with GitLab is its all-or-nothing model. If you want to use any of the GitLab tools, you need to use all of the GitLab tools. So, if your team is opinionated when it comes to the tools they use, you’ll have to convince them to leave behind what’s familiar and switch to something new. GitLab CI provides basic caching to speed up builds.

CircleCI

CircleCI was founded in 2011 to help organizations get to market faster, with improved engineering team productivity and product quality. Boasting 1 million+ application builds a day, CircleCI enables engineering teams with automation for their software builds, tests, and deployments. CircleCI is a point solution mainly for CI with immature CD capabilities. More tools will need to be integrated within the tech stack to achieve the same results. While providing a large number of compute and execution environments, CircleCI users suffer from security and stability issues, a lack of pricing transparency, and a lack of governance.

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What is the Best CI Tool For Your Company?

When choosing a Continuous Integration (CI) tool, consider several key factors to ensure the tool meets your team's needs:

1. Ease of Use: Look for tools that offer a user-friendly interface and easy configuration. Some tools, like Harness, emphasize minimizing scripting requirements, which can streamline the setup process.
2. Integration Capabilities: Ensure the CI tool integrates well with other essential platforms your team uses (e.g., Git, Jira, cloud services like AWS or GCP). Tools like Harness, GitLab, and Codefresh offer extensive integrations with these ecosystems.
3. Scalability: As your team grows, your CI tool should scale with you. Some tools, like Jenkins, provide excellent flexibility but may require more manual configuration to scale efficiently. Others, like Harness, aim for out-of-the-box scalability with minimal additional setup.
4. Cost: Some CI tools offer free tiers or open-source options (e.g., Jenkins or Travis CI), while others, like Harness, provide more enterprise-level features for larger teams and projects, which may come at a higher price.
5. Governance and Security: Tools should offer robust security features such as role-based access control (RBAC), single sign-on (SSO), and secrets management. For example, Harness provides these as standard features, which are crucial for compliance and security audits.
6. Automation & Speed: Look for tools that automate as much of the process as possible. Harness uses AI to help with deployment verification and rollback automation, which can be a big time-saver.

Choosing the right tool depends on your specific project size, budget, and desired feature set​.

Get Started with Harness CI

At Harness, we ensure we deliver all these benefits to customers using intelligent features such as Test Intelligence, Cache Intelligence, and Hosted builds. Try Harness CI today!

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