Having noticed software teams adopting code delivery practices, tools, and procedures from the internet as-is, I recommend caution with this approach. More often than not, what works for another organization might not directly fit into your tooling landscape, long-term technology commitments, and the variety of software applications you are working with. Just like containerizing your software applications with Docker and Kubernetes cannot solve the underlying design issues, adopting the wrong tools, investing efforts in on-premises hosting, or trying to adapt your applications to how a tool expects them to work does more harm than good. So, let’s look at three areas you should be considering when you’re deciding on a particular offering to spearhead your CI/CD journey.
How to choose the best CI/CD solution for your needs
The time you invest in finding out the right set of tools is worth it. It can help your business move faster in ways that were not possible before. I recommend three factors that you should consider.
Integration with existing tools
It is not only about the software that end users would consume. Countless others might be in use already for things such as task management, paging, notifications, testing, and so on.
Ideally, the CI/CD tool should offer pre-built integrations so that you don’t have to invest time in writing glue code. When readymade integrations are leveraged, it leads to easier operations and spares you time that can be used for business differentiators. Disjoint processes lead to additional overheads around switching from one tool to another and dependency on manual steps affects agility.
When operating in the cloud, you can also think of gradually replacing the other solutions with cloud-native ones as it’s generally easier to integrate your CI/CD tools with them.
On-premises hosting considerations
If you have an on-premises data center, you might consider hosting a tool on your own to save costs. A SaaS solution takes away a lot of management tasks by focusing on the core capabilities you need. Some of these CI/CD software providers also offer on-premises hosting but it has to work with your existing infrastructure type and versions.
If you need full control around customizing the solution as per your needs, you can also evaluate options to run the control plane in your data center and leverage the cloud for routine tasks such as build, test, and deployment runs.