CI/CD Providers

In this section, we’ll review a current list of providers on the internet to help you automate your builds. While there are other providers available, these are considered what developers use in the industry as a standard.

Since we are targeting ASP.NET Core, rest assured, each of these providers supports ASP.NET Core in its build processes and deployments.

Microsoft Azure Pipelines

Since Microsoft created ASP.NET Core, it only makes sense to mention its off-premises cloud offerings. It does offer on-premises and hybrid support as well. Azure Pipelines provides the most automated support for ASP.NET Core applications and deployment mechanisms to date.

While Azure is considered one of the biggest cloud providers in the world, I consider Azure Pipelines a small component under the Azure moniker.

Important note

You can learn more about Azure Pipelines here: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/products/devops/pipelines/.

GitHub Actions

When Microsoft purchased GitHub back in June of 2018, GitHub came out with an automation pipeline with GitHub Actions in October of the same year.

Since GitHub is a provider of all things source code-related, GitHub Actions was considered an inevitable step toward making code deployable.

After signing up to Actions, you’ll notice the screens are very “Azure-ish” and provide a very similar interface when you’re building software pipelines.

Important note

You can learn more about GitHub Actions here: https://github.com/features/actions.

Amazon CodePipeline

With Amazon commanding a large lead in the e-commerce landscape and with its Amazon Web Services (AWS offering), it also provides automated pipelines for developers.

Its pipelines are broken down into categories:

• CodeCommit: For identifying source code repositories
• CodeArtifact: A centralized location for build artifacts
• CodeBuild: A dedicated service for building your product based on updates in your repository, which are defined in CodeCommit
• CodeDeploy: For managing environments for deploying software
• CodePipelne: The glue that holds it all together

You can pick and choose the services you need based on your requirements. Amazon CodePipeline is similar to most cloud services, where you can use one service or all of them.

Important note

You can learn more about Amazon CodePipeline here: https://aws.amazon.com/codepipeline/.

Google CI

The final cloud provider is none other than Google CI. Google CI also provides the tools required to perform automated builds and deployments.

Google CI provides similar tools, such as Artifact Registry, source repositories, Cloud Build, and even private container registries.

As mentioned previously, once you understand how one cloud provider works, you’ll start to see similar offerings in other cloud providers.

Important note

You can learn more about Google CI here: https://cloud.google.com/solutions/continuous-integration.

In this section, we examined four CI/CD cloud providers: Microsoft’s Azure Pipelines, GitHub Actions, Amazon’s CodePipeline, and Google’s CI. Any one of these providers is a suitable candidate for creating an ASP.NET Core pipeline.