Workflow Orchestration Vs. Continuous Integration: What’s the Difference?

For most companies, Digital Transformation is no longer just a buzzword but a very real shift in how every aspect of the organization operates. That is certainly true for IT and one of the somewhat ironic characteristics of this shift is a huge emphasis on automation. Ironic, because you would have thought that Information “Technology” was always about automation, which is pretty much a synonym for computing. Well, better late than never, I guess.

One of the results of this renewed focus on automation is increased scrutiny of tooling, a desire to understand the similarities and differences of the vast array of available tools and which tool is best for which function.

I’m choosing proxies for these two categories; Control-M, the product I work for and the leading¹ application workflow orchestration tool and Jenkins, the most popular Continuous Integration (CI) tool.

Control-M according to
Control-M

The home page states “Control-M simplifies application workflow orchestration, making it easy to define, schedule, manage and monitor application workflows, ensuring visibility and reliability, and improving SLAs.” The primary Control-M focus is operating business applications in production.

Jenkins

From jenkins.io the subhead on the site is very instructive and captures the essence of the comparison here; it states “Build great things at any scale”. The emphasis is on building software. The Press page stresses the focus on building software with this “blurb” : “Jenkins is … supported by … people interested in continuous integration, continuous delivery and modern software delivery practices. Built on the Java Virtual Machine (JVM), it provides more than 1,500 plugins that extend Jenkins to automate with practically any technology software delivery teams use. … ”