Which Tools Do I Need for Continuous Delivery? A Practitioner’s Guide

Engineers often face a specific tension when releasing software: the business demands speed, but operations demands stability. Continuous delivery resolves this conflict by ensuring software is always in a deployable state. However, achieving this state requires more than installing a single “CD tool” or setting up a Jenkins server. It requires a connected ecosystem of technologies that automate the path from code commit to production feedback.

This article breaks down the specific categories of tools required to build a modern deployment pipeline. It moves beyond generic lists to explain the architectural role each tool plays in ensuring speed, safety, and supply chain integrity.

TL;DR

• Continuous delivery is a practice, not a product. No single tool solves CD; it requires a chain of tools handling versioning, building, storing, and releasing.
• Decouple deployment from release. Using feature flags allows you to deploy code safely without exposing it to users immediately, minimizing risk.
• Security must be automated. Modern pipelines require tools for SBOM generation and artifact signing to meet supply chain security standards.
• Metrics drive tool selection. Select tools that expose data on DORA metrics like lead time and change failure rate to track actual improvement.

Understanding the Continuous Delivery Ecosystem

Continuous delivery is the ability to get changes of all types—including new features, configuration changes, bug fixes, and experiments—into production, or into the hands of users, safely and quickly in a sustainable way.

The primary mechanism for this is the deployment pipeline. A deployment pipeline is an automated implementation of your application’s build, deploy, test, and release process. When asking “which tools do I need,” you are really asking which tools act as the components of this pipeline.

A common misconception is conflating continuous delivery tools with continuous deployment tools. Continuous delivery ensures the software can be released at any time. Continuous deployment goes a step further and pushes every validated change to production automatically. The toolchain for both is similar, but continuous delivery requires mechanisms for controlled, often manual, release decisions (like feature flags or approval gates) that continuous deployment bypasses.

The Foundational Continuous Delivery Tools

To build a functioning deployment pipeline, you need tools that cover four specific stages: source management, build automation, artifact management, and infrastructure provisioning.

Version control systems (VCS)

The foundation of any delivery pipeline is the version control system. This is where the single source of truth for both application code and infrastructure configurations lives.

For continuous delivery to work, teams must adopt trunk-based development. This workflow involves developers merging small, frequent updates to a core “trunk” or “main” branch. The VCS tool you choose must support branch protection rules, code review workflows (Pull Requests/Merge Requests), and webhooks to trigger downstream automation.

While Git is the standard protocol, the hosting platform (GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket) matters because it often dictates how your CI/CD pipeline triggers events.

Continuous integration (CI) servers

The CI server acts as the orchestrator. Its job is to detect changes in the VCS, execute a build script, run automated tests, and provide immediate feedback to the developer.

A robust CI strategy does not just run unit tests. It validates the integration of the code into the shared repository. The output of the CI process should be a deployable artifact. If the build fails, the pipeline stops, preventing bad code from moving downstream.

Common tools in this space include Jenkins (highly customizable, self-hosted), GitHub Actions (integrated directly into the repo), and CircleCI (cloud-native performance). The choice often depends on whether you need deep customization or prefer a managed service that requires less maintenance.

Artifact repositories

One of the most critical principles of continuous delivery is “build once, deploy anywhere.” You should never rebuild your application for different environments (e.g., staging vs. production). Instead, the CI server should produce a single, immutable binary or container image that moves through the pipeline.

You need an artifact repository to store these binaries. This tool acts as a secure warehouse. It versions your artifacts and ensures that the exact code tested in staging is the exact code deployed to production.

For containerized workloads, this is a Container Registry (like Docker Hub, Amazon ECR, or JFrog Artifactory). For Java, it might be Maven; for Node, NPM. If your toolchain lacks this component, you risk “drift,” where the production version differs slightly from the tested version due to dependency updates occurring between builds.

Infrastructure as code (IaC) tools

Continuous delivery requires reproducible environments. If you configure production servers manually, you cannot guarantee reliable deployments.

Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tools allow you to define your infrastructure (servers, load balancers, databases) in text files stored in version control. When the deployment pipeline runs, it uses these tools to provision or update the environment to match the definition.

Terraform and Pulumi are standard for cloud-agnostic provisioning, while Kubernetes (managed via Helm or Kustomize) handles container orchestration. This ensures that creating a new test environment is an automated process, not a manual ticket sent to a sysadmin.

Modernizing the Pipeline: Beyond Basic Automation

The tools listed above create a basic “build and deploy” pipeline. However, modern high-performing teams add specific layers to handle risk, security, and observability.

Progressive delivery and feature management

A major risk in traditional continuous delivery is the “big bang” release. If you merge code and deploy it, users see it immediately. If there is a bug, everyone is affected.

Progressive delivery separates deployment (moving code to production) from release (exposing features to users). The essential tool for this is a feature management platform.

Feature flags allow you to wrap new code in a toggle. You deploy the code to production in a dormant state. You then turn the flag on for a small percentage of users (canary release) or specific internal teams (ring deployment). If metrics look good, you gradually increase exposure. If errors spike, you flip the switch off (kill switch) instantly without a full rollback.

Unleash is an example of a continuous delivery tool that handles this layer. It provides the SDKs to evaluate flags within your application and a control plane to manage rollout strategies. For enterprise scale, architecture matters here; tools that use edge caching (like Unleash Edge) ensure that flag evaluations happen locally and quickly, handling tens of thousands of requests per second without latency penalties.

Pipeline security and supply chain integrity

Security is no longer a final audit step; it is a pipeline component. Known as DevSecOps, this approach integrates security tools directly into the CI/CD process.

Supply chain attacks target the pipeline itself. To defend against this, you need tools that verify the integrity of your software.

• SBOM Generators: Tools that generate a Software Bill of Materials (like CycloneDX) to list every library and dependency in your application.
• Signing Tools: Tools like Cosign or Sigstore that digitally sign your artifacts. This proves that the artifact attempting to run in production was actually built by your trusted CI server and hasn’t been tampered with.
• Scanners: SAST (Static Application Security Testing) and DAST (Dynamic Application Security Testing) tools that run during the CI phase to catch vulnerabilities before an artifact is created.

NIST guidelines now explicitly recommend integrating these supply chain security strategies into CI/CD pipelines.

Observability and feedback loops

Continuous delivery relies on feedback. You cannot deliver continuously if you are blind to the impact of a deployment.

Observability tools (logging, metrics, and tracing) are essential for the “Verify” stage of the pipeline. When a deployment occurs, your monitoring tools should detect anomalies immediately.

For teams using feature flags, this connection is vital. You need to know if enabling a feature caused a spike in latency. Advanced setups connect their feature management tool to their observability platform (like Datadog or Prometheus) to trigger automated kill switches if health metrics degrade.

Structuring Your Tool Selection Strategy

Selecting tools should be driven by the outcomes you want to achieve, not just popularity. The DORA metrics provide a framework for evaluating your delivery performance:

1. Deployment Frequency: How often do you release?
2. Lead Time for Changes: How long from commit to production?
3. Change Failure Rate: How often do deployments fail?
4. Time to Restore Service: How fast can you recover?

When evaluating a tool, ask how it influences these metrics. Does a heavy, complex CI server increase your lead time? Does the lack of feature flags increase your change failure rate?

Integration over isolation

A common pitfall is choosing “best-in-class” tools that do not talk to each other. Your CI server must talk to your artifact repository, your deployment tool must talk to your chat ops (Slack/Teams), and your feature flag system must integrate with your issue tracker (Jira).

Look for tools with open APIs and active plugin ecosystems. Vendor-neutral foundations, like the Continuous Delivery Foundation, promote interoperability. This prevents vendor lock-in and allows you to swap out components (e.g., changing from Jenkins to GitLab CI) without rebuilding your entire philosophy.

Conclusion

Building a continuous delivery toolchain is an architectural decision. It starts with the basics: a version control system to manage code and a CI server to automate testing. It matures by adding artifact management and infrastructure as code to ensure consistency.

To reach elite performance levels, you must layer in risk mitigation and security. Implementing feature management allows you to move faster by making releases safe and reversible. Integrating supply chain security tools ensures that your speed does not compromise integrity.

Audit your current pipeline. Identify where manual handoffs or fear of failure slows you down. Replace those manual gates with the appropriate automated tools, and you will build a delivery engine that serves both the business need for speed and the operational need for stability.

FAQS about continuous delivery tools

What is the difference between continuous integration and continuous delivery tools?

Continuous integration (CI) tools focus on the early stages of development, automating the building and testing of code whenever a change is committed. Continuous delivery (CD) tools extend this process by automating the release readiness, infrastructure provisioning, and deployment to various environments, ensuring the software is always deployable.

Do I need a specific tool for continuous deployment?

You generally use the same tools for continuous delivery and continuous deployment, but the configuration differs. Continuous deployment requires high-confidence automated testing and observability tools to push code to production without human intervention, whereas continuous delivery may pause for a manual approval or feature flag activation before the final release.

How do feature flags fit into continuous delivery tools?

Feature flags decouple the act of deploying code from releasing a feature, allowing teams to merge code to the main branch safely even if the feature isn’t finished. Tools like Unleash manage these flags, enabling progressive rollouts, A/B testing, and instant kill switches that reduce the risk of frequent deployments.

Can I implement continuous delivery with a monolithic application?

Yes, continuous delivery is possible for monoliths, though the tools may need to handle longer build times and more complex artifact management. You may need robust build caching tools and a deployment strategy (like blue-green deployment) that handles the slower startup times typical of large monolithic architectures.

What tools help with the security of a continuous delivery pipeline?

Secure pipelines require tools for Static Application Security Testing (SAST), dependency scanning, and generating Software Bills of Materials (SBOMs). Additionally, tools for signing artifacts (like Cosign) and managing secrets (like HashiCorp Vault) ensure that the pipeline itself does not become an attack vector.