CI-CD Tools

Under Tool, CI-CD Tools groups products that run or orchestrate build, test, and deploy pipelines. The label CI/CD is overloaded: in practice it spans three technique notes we keep separate from this subcategory:

Continuous Integration (adopt): merge often, automated build and Integration Testing on every change.
Continuous Delivery (adopt): artifacts are always releasable; promotion and gates are explicit (on-prem, regulated, or multi-stage SaaS).
Continuous Deployment (assess): every green mainline commit reaches production automatically; right mainly for Software as a Service with strong observability and rollback (often paired with Feature Flags).

Pipeline shapes (how tools map):

Pattern	What happens after CI	Typical fit
CI + deployment	Artifact ships to production (or equivalent) after tests	SaaS, K8s GitOps (ArgoCD), managed runners (GitHub Actions)
CI + delivery	Artifact is built, signed, and handed off; deploy is manual or downstream	On-prem, air-gapped, or customer-operated installs

Tag a product here when the note is about a runner, controller, or deploy server (Actions, Argo CD, Jenkins). Tag the technique notes above when the note is about the practice, not a vendor.

Garden stance (products in this bucket):

adopt GitHub Actions for repos on GitHub (CI and light CD in-repo).
adopt ArgoCD for Kubernetes continuous delivery via GitOps (reconcile from Git; do not conflate with Argo Workflows, which is workflow/CI on-cluster).
trial Argo Workflows when you need DAG-style jobs on K8s without bolting Jenkins onto the cluster.
assess Tekton only if you must standardize on Kubernetes-native pipeline CRDs and accept operational complexity.
hold Jenkins (security and pet-server risk; migrate off where possible) and Capistrano (SSH push deploy; superseded by GitOps or image-based CD for new work).

Cross-cutting: wire DevSecOps, Policy as Code, and secret stores (HashiCorp Vault, cloud secret managers) on the PR path, not inside a pipeline server’s internal credential UI.