Key Criteria for Evaluating CI/CDv2.0

1. Summary

Continuous integration and continuous delivery/deployment (CI/CD) has quickly become the dominant organizational methodology for enabling software development processes that embrace agile working practices. The ability to rapidly iterate, test, and deploy software gives organizations the means to adapt to change faster than ever before.

This report aims to provide detailed insights into the CI/CD platform market, and give readers the tools necessary to evaluate each of the available solutions by assessing their positioning and features against a set of standardized evaluation metrics that assess performance in real world business terms.

By virtue of their nature as aids to software development, CI/CD platforms sit at the bleeding edge of new technologies and must rapidly iterate to facilitate the utilization of any programming language, deployment environment, or testing pipeline a developer might use. Because of this need for constant innovation, this report aims to provide a detailed framework for evaluating these platforms, giving the reader the ability to make informed and effective purchasing decisions.

The report begins with a primer on the need for high-quality CI/CD tooling, setting out the core components and the logical basis of a modern CI/CD pipeline structure. It then lays out the key drivers of evolution within the marketplace as a means of contextualizing GigaOm’s assessment of the sector’s future.

Harnessing our Key Criteria methodology, the report presents the non-negotiable requirements for all CI/CD solutions, including identity-based access management and the ability to store the entire CI/CD pipeline as code for seamless replicability and version control of development, testing, and deployment builds.

Next, the report assesses the features that differentiate vendors’ offerings from one another, including the options for multi-stage pipelines and deployments, as well as the focus on governance by design.

Looking ahead to the future of the sector, the report concludes with an assessment of how features that are currently experimental will develop into competitive advantages over the next 18-36 months as they are adopted and evolved by vendors.

Read the full report to:

• Discover how CI/CD tools are embracing innovation best practices in order to deliver value to all stakeholders.
• Explore the metrics by which organizations can differentiate among different types of CI/CD offerings in terms of scale and feature sets.
• Learn how your organization can fully embrace digital transformation in a way that optimizes software production and reduces friction between innovation and execution.
• Understand how the maturation and standardization of development processes and build environments drives the need for CI/CD tools in order to free up engineering time and resources.

Michael J. Levan is a consultant, analyst, and technical researcher with a career that has spanned countless business sectors, and includes working with companies such as Microsoft and Pluralsight. An engineer at heart, he is passionate about enabling excellence in software development and actively mentors developers to help them realize their full potential.