Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) pipelines have revolutionized the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) by automating the building, testing, and actual deployment of your infrastructure and applications.
Jenkins is one of the oldest and most widely utilized CI/CD tools, whereas GitHub Actions simplifies CI/CD by allowing developers to create workflows natively within GitHub.
What is Jenkins?
Key features:
- Open-source - Jenkins is open-source and has a rich ecosystem of plugins
- Declare pipeline as Code - With Jenkins, you can use the DSL language to define your pipelines as code
- Integrates with many programming languages - You can build pipelines for anything you can imagine
- Distributed builds - Jenkins gives you the ability to distribute workloads across multiple servers
After logging in, you can set up a pipeline by going to the Dashboard and selecting a new item.
Example Jenkins pipeline that runs your Terraform workflow:
pipeline {
agent any
environment {
TF_IN_AUTOMATION = 'true'
AWS_CREDENTIALS = credentials('aws-credentials')
}
stages {
stage('Checkout') {
steps {
checkout scm
}
}
stage('Terraform Init') {
steps {
sh 'terraform init'
}
}
stage('Terraform Plan') {
steps {
sh 'terraform plan -out=tfplan'
}
}
stage('Approval') {
steps {
input message: 'Do you want to apply this plan?', ok: 'Apply'
}
}
stage('Terraform Apply') {
steps {
sh 'terraform apply -auto-approve tfplan'
}
}
}
post {
always {
cleanWs()
}
}
}
Read more: is a CI/CD platform that automates your SDLC processes. It allows you to build, test, and deploy infrastructure and applications directly from your GitHub repository by creating custom workflows. It offers various configuration options for triggers based on commits and merges, and it is highly extensible with its
You can create and publish the actions you want to contribute and make other people's lives easier.
Key features:
- Native CI/CD integration with your GitHub repositories
- Event-driven - Pipelines and steps inside the pipelines can run based on various events
- Built-in marketplace - GitHub Actions has a rich marketplace of reusable actions that you can use inside your workflows
- Self-hosted runners - GitHub Actions gives you the ability to use your own runners for building and running your workflows
Example GitHub Actions pipeline that runs your Terraform workflow:
name: "Terraform pipeline"
on:
push:
branches: ["main"]
pull_request:
branches: ["main"]
env:
TF_IN_AUTOMATION: true
jobs:
terraform:
name: "Terraform"
runs-on: ubuntu-latest
steps:
- name: Checkout
uses: actions/checkout@v3
- name: Setup Terraform
uses: hashicorp/setup-terraform@v2
- name: Configure AWS Credentials
uses: aws-actions/configure-aws-credentials@v1
with:
aws-access-key-id: ${{ secrets.AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID }}
aws-secret-access-key: ${{ secrets.AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY }}
aws-region: us-west-2
- name: Terraform Init
run: terraform init
- name: Terraform Format
run: terraform fmt -check
- name: Terraform Plan
run: terraform plan -out=tfplan
- name: Terraform Plan Status
if: steps.plan.outcome == 'failure'
run: exit 1
- name: Terraform Apply
if: github.ref == 'refs/heads/main' && github.event_name == 'push'
run: terraform apply -auto-approve tfplan
Read more:
GitHub Actions and Jenkins similarities
Both GitHub Actions and Jenkins are powerful CI/CD tools that allow engineers to automate the SDLC process. They offer extensive customization options - GitHub actions using its marketplace, while Jenkins relies on a powerful plugin ecosystem.
With both of these tools you can automate the deployment of your applications independent of the programming language used, and you can also automate your infrastructure workflows (this can be cumbersome in both cases).
GitHub Actions and Jenkins allow you to use your own infrastructure for running jobs with self-hosted runners and provide ways to store and use secrets.
The differences between GitHub Actions and Jenkins
GitHub Actions can be used both self-hosted and as a SaaS, whereas Jenkins is self-hosted only. Pipelines are defined using different languages - GitHub Actions relies on YAML, while Jenkins uses Groovy.
Jenkins requires more time to master due to its greater complexity and customization options, while GitHub Actions' learning curve is gentler. Their cost structure is different. Jenkins being open-source means that you will have to pay only for the infrastructure that hosts Jenkins, whereas, in GitHub Actions' case, you get a free tier with usage-based pricing beyond that.
Is GitHub Actions better than Jenkins?
GitHub Actions is newer than Jenkins and has many reusable actions that you can leverage for building your pipelines. However, if you are not using GitHub for your VCS, GitHub Actions doesn't make too much sense. Jenkins is more versatile on this point, and it can be used with any VCS. It is highly extendable with plugins but lacks a SaaS version.
There is no right or wrong between making a choice between these two, but it should always depend on what tooling you are using, and if you want to maintain a self-hosted tool for your tooling.
Alternative to GitHub Actions and Jenkins - Spacelift
When it comes to infrastructure orchestration, it's becoming clearer that generic CI/CD platforms such as GitHub Actions and Jenkins are not specialized enough to take care of everything you might need in your workflows. That's where Spacelift shines.
With Spacelift, you get:
- to build multi-infrastructure automation workflows with dependencies, having the ability to build a workflow that, for example, generates your ec2 instances using Terraform and combines it with Ansible to configure them
- Self-service infrastructure via , enabling your developers to do what matters -- developing application code while not sacrificing control
- Creature comforts such as and optional remediation
.
Key points
GitHub Actions and Jenkins are both great choices for managing the CI/CD processes across your application deployment, but generally, they struggle when it comes to infrastructure, especially because you have to build many mechanisms to obtain a decent workflow.
If you are interested in a product that can orchestrate provisioning, configuration, and governance, across your infrastructure, Spacelift is the answer. with one of our engineers.
Written by Flavius Dinu
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