We know we're in perilous territory here, since we build a competing tool, but we feel we have to address a persistent problem. Continuous Integration tools like CruiseControl and Jenkins are valuable for software development, but as your build process gets more complex it requires something beyond just Continuous Integration: It requires a deployment pipeline. We frequently see people trying to use Jenkins as a Deployment Pipeline with the aid of plugins, but our experience is that these quickly become a tangle. Jenkins 2.0 introduces "Pipeline as Code" but continues to model pipelines using plugins and fails to change the core Jenkins product to model pipelines directly. In our experience, tools that are built around a first-class representation of deployment pipelines are much more suitable, and this is what drove us to replace CruiseControl with GoCD. Today we see several products that embrace deployment pipelines, including ConcourseCI, LambdaCD, Spinnaker, Drone and GoCD.
