Análise comparativa de ferramentas de CI/CD: um estudo de caso da migração entre GitHub Actions e GitLab CI no sistema Adote Fácil

Abstract

The adoption of DevOps practices and the implementation of Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) pipelines have become fundamental pillars for ensuring agility and reliability in modern software development. However, the diversity of tools available on the market imposes significant interoperability challenges. Choosing between leading solutions, such as GitHub Actions and GitLab CI/CD, involves technical trade-offs that directly impact team productivity. This work aims to conduct a practical comparative analysis between these tools, documenting the pipeline migration process of the “Adote Fácil” application, a microservices-based pet adoption platform. To this end, a complete portability of the automation flow was performed, identifying critical challenges such as syntactic differences (workflow-centric versus stage-centric approach) and the complexity of Docker-in-Docker (DinD) orchestration. Quantitative results demonstrated that migrating to GitLab CI resulted in a 2.6-fold increase in configuration code verbosity and required 7 correction iterations for complete stabilization. Qualitatively, it is evidenced that while GitHub Actions prioritizes ease of use through abstractions, GitLab CI offers greater granular control over the execution environment, albeit requiring a steeper learning curve. The study contributes a technical guide for developers facing transition challenges between automation tools.