The CI/CD Landscape

The category, not just GitHub Actions

GitHub Actions is the focus of this quest, but it is one of many tools in a category that has been evolving for 20+ years. Knowing the alternatives helps you understand Actions' design choices and to switch when a job calls for it.

Self-hosted server tools

Jenkins — the elder. Free, infinitely flexible, requires you to host it. Plugin ecosystem is enormous and aging. Still runs huge enterprise pipelines.
TeamCity — JetBrains' offering. Strong UI, good for monolith shops.
GoCD — pipeline-as-code with strong dependency modelling.

Source-code-platform integrated

GitHub Actions — runs in GitHub. YAML in repo. Marketplace of shared actions. The default if your code lives on GitHub.
GitLab CI/CD — same idea on GitLab. .gitlab-ci.yml + GitLab Runners. Self-hostable end-to-end.
Bitbucket Pipelines — Atlassian's. YAML in repo, Atlassian-native.

Cloud-native CI

CircleCI — pioneered cloud CI. Strong caching, parallelism. Pay-per-minute.
Buildkite — hybrid: their orchestrator, your runners. Popular with scale-ups that need beefy custom hardware.
Travis CI — formerly the OSS default. Now mostly displaced by Actions for OSS projects.

Cloud-vendor-native

AWS CodePipeline + CodeBuild, Google Cloud Build, Azure DevOps Pipelines — best when you are already deeply on that cloud.

Specialized

Argo CD — GitOps for Kubernetes. Pipeline state lives in Git, deployment lives in cluster.
Tekton — Kubernetes-native CI primitives. Build-your-own.

Code

Same idea — three syntaxes·yaml

# GitHub Actions
jobs:
  test:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v4
      - run: pytest

# GitLab CI
test:
  image: python:3.12
  script:
    - pytest

# CircleCI
version: 2.1
jobs:
  test:
    docker:
      - image: cimg/python:3.12
    steps:
      - checkout
      - run: pytest

The category, not just GitHub Actions

Self-hosted server tools

Source-code-platform integrated

Cloud-native CI

Cloud-vendor-native

Specialized

Code

External links

Exercise

Progress

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