Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery / Deployment (CD) are an integral part of contemporary software development practices that help increase efficiency and streamline workflows. CI/CD pipelines reduce human intervention, thereby minimizing downtime and resulting in faster code releases. GoCD is an open-source CI/CD system that permits users to simply model and visualize complex workflows, optimize their processes, and configure dependencies for fast and on-demand deployment.

GoCD has a worth stream map that gives an end-to-end view of the pipeline. It helps visualize the CI/CD workflows, providing features like seeing what caused the pipeline to be triggered (a git commit or a time trigger), what downstream pipelines were triggered due to the same, the present pipeline status, and the flexibility to simply debug problems. GoCD also has a fan-in (multiple upstream materials are required to trigger a downstream pipeline) and fan-out (a cloth’s completion triggers multiple pipelines) dependency management that helps avoid spurious builds.

Source: https://docs.gocd.org/current/navigation/value_stream_map.html

Advantages of GoCD

  • GoCD’s value stream map helps users easily navigate across different jobs, spot any inefficiencies, and optimize their processes.
  • GoCD supports cloud-native deployments on Kubernetes and Docker and offers out-of-the-box CD capabilities.
  • With features like parallel execution and dependency management, GoCD allows users to model complex CD workflows for fast feedback.
  • GoCD provides advanced traceability of a broken pipeline by tracking every change from commit to deployment.
  • GoCD also has the flexibility to integrate with PostgreSQL, H2, and MySQL databases.
  • The tool has extension points for which users can create plugins.

Limitations of GoCD

  • GoCD has a lesser variety of plugins than its competitors, like Jenkins.
  • Configuring agents in GoCD is cumbersome and requires expertise.
  • The tool can also be more memory-intensive than a few of the other CI/CD tools.
  • Scalability is one other limitation of the tool, and users might face challenges when there are too many pipelines.

In conclusion, GoCD is a CI/CD system that permits users to simply model and visualize complex workflows. It eliminates bottlenecks, keeps configuration tidy, and facilitates collaboration. Some users have reported issues with the tool, like fewer plugins, harder configuration, and issues with scalability. However, it has many other features that simplify the strategy of development, and users could make the alternative based on their specific use case.

This article was originally published at www.aidevtoolsclub.com