5 Best Microservices CI/CD Tools You Need to Check Out

Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment, or CI/CD, has become a key cornerstone for building, testing, and deploying applications across environments these days. Here, we talk about the popular build & deploy tools that are centered around microservices application delivery and are being popularly used in the industry today. Take a look!

While CI helps to mitigate the risks and enables a quick and seamless code release by automating multiple code changes from varied developers of the project. On the other hand, CD enables DevOps teams to deliver the integrated code to production seamlessly, thus providing a quick and effective automated process to release new features and updates to customers without much hassles. 

The amazing benefits of Microservices include improved agility, enhanced productivity, faster development time, and much more. No doubt, this is the reason why Microservices architecture is the next wave of today’s dynamic market space.

To leverage the most out of the CI/CD pipelines and to overcome complex Microservices challenges, it’s important for enterprises to adopt the best practices and tools. Here are 5 popular build & deploy tools for seamless and secure delivery of CI/CD pipelines.

Source: GitLab

Known as a “complete DevOps platform,” GitLab is an open-source web-based service that helps the development, security, and Ops teams to collaborate in a better way. GitLab improves the pace of the development cycle, reduces development costs, renders faster time to market, and increases developer productivity.

Just like GitHub, one of the main features of GitLab is the ability to act as a source code repository. However, the approach behind GitLab goes beyond just being a code repository and spans various DevOps CI/CD features to help software teams in automating delivery pipelines. 

GitLab was brought into being with the basic idea of bringing all the features of source code management and Microservices CI/CD tools that build, test, and deploy code under one roof.

Key Features:

- Well-orchestrated Source-code management.
- Quick and hassle-free build/deploy/test functionality.
- Cloud-based SaaS (software as a service) and on-premises services are offered.
- Time-tracking ability with granular details.
- Automatically administered Analytics report.
- Complete security testing of static applications.

CircleCI is one of the most popular cloud-based CI/CD tools used by enterprises as an alternative to Jenkins, an open-source CI/CD and deployment automation DevOps tool. CircleCI helps in the automated and hassle-free setup of CI/CD pipelines.

It is a well-reputed tool known for its incredible features, including speed, performance, and scalability. Leading companies such as Facebook and Spotify use CircleCI for implementing their CI/CD workflows. 

Leveraging integration with BitBucket and GitHub, CircleCI helps DevOps teams in automating the build & deploy process of an app. CircleCI enables the development teams to test their code after every commit and create workflows for large-scale CI/CD pipelines. The tool enables hassle-free automation of the Microservices CI/CD pipelines at a great pace. 

- Simple and basic initial configuration.
- Default Integration with GitHub and BitBucket.
- Scalable cloud platform.
- Can seamlessly deploy to a wide variety of environments, including AWS, NPM.
- Ability to select “Build Environment.”

As Microservices CI/CD workflows scale, managing them becomes much more complex. BuildPiper is a next-gen CI/CD pipeline automation and workflow orchestration tool. The main idea behind the development of BuildPiper is to enable a highly intuitive and easy setup of feature-rich delivery pipelines for a seamless and secure product release. As the pipeline events are logged at every step, BuildPiper renders comprehensive visibility allowing DevOps teams to analyze pipeline efficiency and troubleshoot effectively. 

One thing that makes BuildPiper the most coveted platform for enabling enterprise-grade Microservices is its ability to build & deploy multiple microservices in a single pipeline through its robust and secured Macro pipelines. Leveraging the out-of-the-box capabilities of Macro pipelines, BuildPiper helps in setting up Microservices CI/CD pipelines with much reduced time and effort.

Source: BuildPiper

Automated CI checks and comprehensive CI analysis offered by ‘BuildPiper’ is what sets it apart from the league and helps the software teams to identify defects and vulnerabilities in the initial stages of the pipeline itself, ensuring a quick, compliant, and hassle-free code release. 

Source: BuildPiper

BuildPiper helps you in a simple pipeline construct of stages and jobs. The four types of stages it offers include Edit Stage, Add Job, Delete Stage, and Delete all jobs. Jobs types that users can perform with BuildPiper include, Build, Deploy, Promote, and API Call.

Key Features 

- Automated CI Checks
- Comprehensive CI Analysis 
- Multi-Language CI Support
- Intuitive and hassle-free Setup of Feature-rich Delivery Pipelines
- Multiple Options to Trigger the Pipeline that includes Manual, Schedule, and SCM Poll.
- Simple and Uncomplicated Pipeline Construct of Stages &  Jobs
- Real-Time Metrics via an Interactive and User-friendly UI
- Easy to understand and see UI and YAML view 
- A Kubernetes dashboard for a 360-degree cluster view.

GitHub Actions is an event-driven automation tool that enables teams to seamlessly implement CI/CD workflows natively on the GitHub platform.

Using the tool, developers can automatically trigger workflows for any GitHub event — such as a commit, issue creation, or pull request. Say, for instance, a pull request can be performed to automatically run and execute a suite of tests.

GitHub Actions makes it easy to automate software workflows with the help of best-in-class CI/CD practices. Development teams have complete flexibility in doing code reviews, handling branch management, and implying issue triaging in a way they want to.

A major advantage of using GitHub Actions is CI/CD processes that earlier required multiple integrations and services can run directly in the GitHub repository now. This means less complexity and less friction in the Microservices CI/CD pipelines.

- Ability to build, test, and deploy directly from Github.
- Automatic workflows can be initiated by any GitHub event such as push, pull, issue creation, etc.
- Real-time logging of events.
- Built-in secret stores to manage database credentials and keys.
- A large library for creating custom actions.

Argo CD is an open-source tool for Kubernetes to execute workflows, manage Kubernetes clusters, and implement GitOps in the right manner. It has become one of the most popular “GitOps” tools for Kubernetes (K8s) in the past few years. One of the reasons for its burgeoning popularity is that it’s a cloud-native and open-source tool.

Argo uses git-based repositories (like GitHub) as a source of truth that provides a clear picture of the desired state of Kubernetes-based applications. It acts as a Kubernetes controller that monitors the app and can identify and resync Kubernetes clusters that are not in their desired states.

- Automate K8s deployment.
- Supports a variety of configuration management templates such as YAML, Helm, etc.
- Rollback to any desired configuration in a supported repository.
- Simplifies complex and advanced Kubernetes deployment strategies such as Canary and Blue-Green made easy.
- Continuous reporting of the health status.

Wrapping it All Up

CI/CD has now become an integral part of modern software development methods and practices. A secure and well-rounded CI/CD pipeline is critical to keeping an organization at par with other software companies in this competitive market space. This is why tech leaders and entrepreneurs across the globe are looking for the right tools for their businesses.

So, if you’re planning to make your next move for CI/CD implementation, this blog will definitely help you out in identifying the different build & deploy tools available for implementing CI/CD.