In today’s rapidly evolving landscape, modern software development, testing and delivery have become increasingly complex. They face the twofold challenge of dealing with increased technological complexity while delivering faster, more frequent software updates without compromising the quality. Achieving this goal requires equipping teams with the capabilities of continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) pipelines — a set of development values and practices. This paradigm shift has led to a transformation from a monolithic code running on a single runtime and being deployed by a single build to a large-scale distributed software with different software modules due to the rise of polyglot programming. However, CI and CD rely on a robust backbone consisting of tools and frameworks, which empower developers to integrate their changes into the mainstream frequently, where they are reviewed, tested and deployed using these pipelines.

A plethora of tools are available in the market, spanning both open source and commercial, catering to the evolving needs of software delivery. Nonetheless, since different development environments have distinct needs and challenges, one size does not fit all. Hence, choosing the right CI/CD tool becomes crucial for a team in the long run. This choice is best made at the inception of the project, based on specific objective parameters of the project. This whitepaper discusses and evaluates the key parameters for CI/CD, based on the authors' extensive experience as DevOps architects in continuous integration and delivery of multiple projects.