Optimizing CI/CD Implementations
Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery or Deployment (CI/CD) is an agile software development best practice designed to enable more frequent and reliable code updates. The CI/CD market is characterized by a large number of vendors with various on premise and cloud-based offerings, but no universal out-of-the-box approach exists. Additionally, CI/CD remains aspirational for most organizations, who have a long way to go before they’ve fully automated the build, test, deliver and deploy cycle. ActiveState aims to help change that.
We conducted a survey to help understand what works, what doesn’t, and share best practices so we can all improve our CI/CD implementations. Additonally, the survey also helped ActiveState identify the gaps our open source language automation platform can fill. This white paper introduces these insights and implementations.
Enterprises use a wide range of both on premise and cloud-based CI/CD implementations. While there’s a definite preference for Jenkins, developers are seeking solutions for other implementations, especially cloud-based ones.
However, the adoption of new CI/CD solutions is not straightforward. One of the key reasons (besides license cost) is that, while many employ best practices such as the use of containers, there is no standard implementation methodology. Furthermore, using custom, non-standard runtime environments with cloud-based CI/CD solutions can be quite complex.
This is where the ActiveState Platform steps in. Our platform provides pre-built, custom runtime environments that not only speed up container builds but also simplify and standardize cloud-based CI/CD implementations, allowing you to create a far more portable solution.
This white paper pulls insights from the survey and proposes the ActiveState Platform as a DevOps tool that provides
- Reproducibility – with more frequent code check-ins and deployments, any inconsistencies between dev, test, and production environments can introduce major stumbling blocks.
- Transparency – security and compliance issues that arise from a lack of provenance around open source language artifacts can also hold up the CI/CD chain.
Delve deep into various DevOps tools like Azure, Google Cloud Build, GitHub Actions etc. and avoid common CI/CD Pitfalls with these additional CI/CD resources.
Here at ActiveState, we’re actively working to enhance our multi-language, multi-OS open source language platform (the ActiveState Platform) to help improve enterprise CI/CD tooling and practices.