Jenkins is getting Old, so what are the alternatives in 2021 ?

Why You Should Look For Jenkins Alternative?  Best Alternatives for Jenkins in 2020-21

Jenkins has been a de-facto standard tool for CI/CD in the Devops pipeline for many years now.However over the last couple of years , it looks like Jenkins is loosing is luster and sheen, especially with the world showing a fast adaptability for technologies like docker and kubernetes.

So is Jenkins going to be a dead and lost tool soon?

Well, its too early to comment or assume such theories, but definitely as the DevOps people we need to keep an eye on the Continuous Change and Continuous Evolvement of new and better tools in the ecosystem.

Jenkins as a CI tool and common issues

Jenkins is one of the essential CI/CD tool for DevOps professionals. It is one of the most trusted and well-known open-source tools. Jenkins is used for building and testing software projects continuously which makes it easy for developers to integrate changes in a project. Jenkins is a continuous integration software tool.

However, since the last few years,  Jenkins has been losing its shine and reputation. Jenkins enjoys a lots of love and support from the community and also many plugins to support the Jenkins ecosystem.

Off-late a lot of Jenkins plugins have become redundant, and are no longer maintained.Also not all plugins are compatible with the new Declarative style of pipelines. Jenkins again is an old tool and was not designed for the new container age technologies. Jenkins also does not get well with a microservices kind of architecture.

In general Jenkins as a tool still holds value for following use-cases:

1. You are using an on-premise solution.
2. Most of your codebase is hosted in-house.
3. You have a big team to take care of and manage Jenkins pipelines dedicatedly.
4. You are tight on budget, and looking for free open-source CI solutions.
5. You still follow the legacy monolithic approach and are away from microservices , containers etc

Why we should look for Jenkins alternatives?

Jenkins is the most popular and widely used CI/CD tool , and an important reason for that is, Jenkins is free.

Now lets us try looking at some of the challenges when using Jenkins:

1. Jenkins has an old and outdated interface and not as user friendly as compared to other tools.
2. As a regular Jenkins user, it is very common to get challenged and frustrated by some missing functionality,a lot of maintenance issues, broken pipelines, Jenkins dependencies and not to forget scaling issues.
3. Also with the world moving towards AI/ML based solutions, Jenkins still does not provide analytics for the end-to-end metrics.
4. Jenkins doesn’t allow a developer to see the commits done by another team member, readily.
5. When using Jenkins,a common problem is tracking and accountability of the changes made by the various members of the development team.All the traceability is only at the code level provided by a source control tool like GIT.

Hence we should be on a lookout for other possible Continuous Integration solutions because of these drawbacks of Jenkins.

So we are trying to share some Jenkins alternatives that are definitely worth exploring in 2021.

Here is a list of Jenkins like tools for the developers to give a try in 2021 :

1. Buddy

Buddy is the open-source CI/CD tool. It removes the chores of configuring and managing Jenkins with a smart UI-UX. Buddy makes it easy to build, test and deploy quality software faster( with an average time of 12 seconds)

Features

• • Full docker & Kubernetes support
  • Supports all programming languages and frameworks.
  • Integrates with AWS, google cloud, azure, digital ocean, etc.
  • 15-minute configuration via  GUI
  • Offers 46X more frequent deployments compared to workflow with no automation.
  • Offers a customizable & reusable build and test environment.

2. Cruise control

It’s both a continuous integration tool and an extensible framework to create a custom continuous built process. Cruise control is written in JAVA. it has many plug-ins for a variety of source controls. It can also be used to build technology and notification schemes like emails and instant messaging.

Features

• • Allows to build multiple projects on a single server.
  • Provides support for remote management.
  • Integration with many source control systems like VSS, CSV, SVN, git, hg, perforce, etc.
  • Integration with other external tools like NAnt, Ndeopend, Nunit, MSBuild, MBunit, Visual studio

3. GoCD

GoCD is a free and open-sources CI/CDserver.It helps organizations easily model and visually complex workflows. This CI tool allows continuous delivery & offers an initiative interface to build CD pipelines.

Features

• • Numerous plugins to enhance functionality.
  • Visualize end-to-end workflow in real-time with a value stream map.
  • Keep orderly configurations.
  • Supports parallel and sequential execution.
  • Allows pipeline configurations to be reused.
  • Increases reliability of pushing to production & empower QA teams by offering easy rollback.

4. Urban code

It’s a CI/CD application by IBM. Urban code releases management tools to help organizations to deliver better software faster. It combines robust visibility, traceability, and auditing feature into a single package.

Features

• • Reduce deployment features.
  • Drag-and-Drop automation.
  • Enterprise level security and scalability
  • Increase the frequency of software delivery.
  • Hybrid cloud environment modeling.
  • Creates a reusable lifecycle template to help describe the path of a build.

5. CircleCI

It’s a cloud-native CI tool that oversees the setup, security & maintenance of instances. It is a flexible CI tool that runs in any environment. This tool reduces bugs and improves the quality of the app.

Features

• • Supports multiple languages like C++, JAVA script, .NET, PHP, Python & Ruby.
  • Allows selecting a Build environment.
  • Improve Android & iOS store ratings by shipping bug-free apps.
  • Provides an interactive dashboard with critical insights on the build.
  • Offers automatic upgrades & instance access to feature releases.
  • Optimal caching and parallelism for fast performance.

6. Buildkite

It’s a reliable and cross-platform CI tool. It makes it easy to run automated builds on your infrastructure. Buildkite is an open-source platform for running CI pipelines that are fast, secure & scalable.

Features

• • Treats infrastructure as code with scheduled builds, separate agents.
  • Offers source control integration chat support & doesn’t need source code access.
  • Runs on a wide range of Operating systems.
  • Offers stable infrastructure.
  • It can run code from any version control system.
  • It can integrate with tools like slack, campfire & Hipchat.

There are many other alternatives for Jenkins which work effectively as well. You can experiment with different tools to improve your work and making it more reliable. Choose the best Jenkins alternative for your team and workflows.