Continuous delivery (CD) is a software engineering approach in which developers produce software in short cycles, ensuring that the software can be reliably released at any time and, when releasing the software, without doing so manually. It enables team to get changes of all types such as new features, configuration changes, bug fixes and experiments—into production, or into the hands of users, safely and quickly in a reliable and consistent way.
Following the automation of builds and unit and integration testing in CI, continuous delivery automates the release of that validated code to a repository. To have an effective continuous delivery process, it’s important that CI is already built into your development pipeline. The goal of continuous delivery is to have a codebase that is always ready for deployment to a production environment.
In continuous delivery, every stage—from the merger of code changes to the delivery of production-ready builds—involves test automation and code release automation. At the end of that process, the operations team is able to deploy an app to production quickly and easily.
We make the following recommendations captured in a legendary LinuxLinks-style ratings chasrt. Many of the systems also provide continuous integration (CI). We only feature free and open source software.
Let’s explore the 13 CD tools. For each application we have compiled its own portal page, a full description with an in-depth analysis of its features, together with links to relevant resources.
| Continuous Delivery Tools | |
|---|---|
| Jenkins | Self-contained, open source automation server with a huge array of plugins |
| Argo CD | Declarative GitOps continuous delivery tool |
| Tekton | Powerful and flexible framework for creating CI/CD systems |
| Earthly | CI/CD framework that runs every pipeline inside containers |
| Dagger | Powerful, programmable CI/CD engine |
| GoCD | Easily model and visualize complex workflows |
| Spinnaker | Cloud native continuous delivery |
| Concourse | Presents a general approach to automation for CI/CD |
| Flux | Continuous delivery and GitOps toolkit for Kubernetes |
| Woodpecker | Uses docker containers to execute pipeline steps |
| Agola | CI/CD redefined |
| Screwdriver | Build platform designed for Continuous Delivery |
| PipeCD | GitOps-style continuous delivery platform |
This article has been updated to reflect the changes outlined in our recent announcement.
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I use Jenkins a lot.