Cloud-Native Microservices With Kubernetes - 2nd Edition

The CI/CD Ecosystem: A Survey of Popular Tools

There is a plethora of CI/CD tools available for creating a pipeline for your microservices.

These tools have different features, capabilities, learning curves, and drawbacks. Some are open-source, while others are not. Some are more Kubernetes-native, while others are not. These tools can work together to achieve your CI/CD goals.

For example, you can create a pipeline with Jenkins and use Argo CD for deployment. You can use GitHub Actions for building and testing, and use Jenkins for deployment, etc.

Here are some of the most popular CI/CD tools:

GitHub Actions

GitHub Actions is a CI/CD tool that integrates with GitHub. It uses a YAML-based declarative approach, which is common in the cloud‑native ecosystem. Developers can define workflows that are triggered by events such as pushes, pull requests, and issue creation.

GitHub Actions is easy to use and free for public repositories. Due to GitHub's popularity as a source code management tool, GitHub Actions has a wide community with many examples, resources, and workflows available in its marketplace.

However, it is not open source or entirely free. Usage beyond the free tier (for example, monthly minutes and artifact storage) is billed. More information about pricing can be found on the pricing page.

Furthermore, GitHub Actions generally assumes your source code is hosted on GitHub—using it with repositories hosted elsewhere requires additional setup or mirroring.

If you are looking for a quick, intuitive, and easy-to-use CI/CD tool, GitHub Actions is a good choice.

Jenkins and Jenkins X

Jenkins is one of the most popular CI/CD tools. It's open source and has a large community. It's straightforward to install and configure, and it has many plugins that extend its functionality. Jenkins is written in Java and is cross‑platform.

Jenkins X is not a version of classic Jenkins; it’s a separate, Kubernetes‑native CI/CD project that embraces GitOps and uses cloud‑native build tools (for example, Tekton) rather than Jenkins plugins. It's open source and designed for modern microservices workflows.

However, Jenkins X can be resource‑intensive and has a steeper learning curve. You may still encounter Groovy or pipeline concepts when integrating with existing Jenkins ecosystems, but day‑to‑day pipelines in Jenkins X are typically defined via Kubernetes‑native tooling.

Spinnaker

Spinnaker is an open‑source Continuous Deployment (CD) tool created by Netflix and extended by Google. Written in Java, JavaScript, and Kotlin, it is cross‑platform and designed to be cloud‑native. Spinnaker works with Kubernetes, AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, and other cloud providers.

It provides two core sets of features: