Today, open source communities use a wide range of tools for building and delivering their software. These tools tend to also be open source, but more and more open source communities are starting to see the value of managed, SaaS tools to help support their communities and their goals. Still, finding the right fit can be a challenge — you want tools that help developers but also support the values of the open source community. Factors like hosting, cost, scalability, and integration support play a crucial role in making these choices. In this post, I'll take a look at why SaaS solutions are often the right choice for open source, and why they may be the right choice for your own continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) open source project.
While Jenkins is most open source projects' default choice for CI/CD — and often rightly so — it's not the only thing your team should consider. These days, teams working in open source projects have also started using various SaaS tools (Heroku, GitHub, JFrog, etc.) for their infrastructure and portions of their CI/CD pipeline. Still, somehow, they are reluctant to use hosted CI servers. This raises the point — if you can trust Heroku for your open source projects, then why shouldn't you trust a SaaS CI/CD provider whose core business is based on the same service?