What Is CI/CD and How Does It Work?

The DevOps community has embraced Continuous Integration and Delivery (CI/CD) as a way of life. The benefits of continuous integration and delivery are undeniable. It provides a clear process for building, testing, and deploying software more frequently and at a lower cost. These benefits have made it an essential part of any DevOps strategy.

Despite its popularity, there are still many questions surrounding the basics of CI/CD. What is CI/CD and how does it work? Why should you care about CI/CD? How do you get started with CI/CD? These are some of the most frequently asked questions about CI/CD. In this blog post, we will answer these questions and more.

What Is CI/CD And How Does It Work?

Continuous Integration and Delivery (CI/CD) is a software development practice that allows for the continual integration and delivery of software builds in a consistent, high-quality fashion. This is done by integrating software builds into a common release pipeline and using automated tests and platform engineering to verify that those builds function as intended before they are promoted to production. If you want to learn CI/CD pipeline and excel in DevOps practices, consider enrolling in DevOps Training. This will act as a catalyst to boost your career in the field of DevOps.

Why should you use CI/CD for your projects? There are many benefits to using CI/CD for your software projects. Some of the most significant benefits include the following:

Reduced cycle times – With continuous integration and delivery, you and your development team can perform multiple builds, testing, and deployments in a matter of hours rather than days. This allows for the rapid iteration of new features and fixes. The end result is that you can have new software releases and features available for your users much sooner than expected. This results in increased productivity and reduced business risk. 

Improved quality – Since test cases prove the functionality of the build and ensure a constant quality standard throughout the build process, implementing continuous integration and delivery means you will almost certainly see an improvement in the overall quality of your deployed applications. This, in turn, will make your users feel more comfortable with the product because it feels more stable and reliable. 

Faster iteration – With frequent deployments and the testing that follows, your development team can quickly find and fix any issues that arise. As a result, your application will be much more stable and resilient to bugs and other errors. This will, in turn, improve the user experience and help drive increased engagement and repeat usage. 

Higher productivity – When you have a streamlined process in place, you can ensure that everyone on your team is engaged and operating at their optimum capacity. With shorter workflows and more frequent builds and tests, you can get more done in less time. This equates to increased productivity and cost-savings. 

Minimized risks – Using a streamlined process for development and testing means that less manpower is required to maintain a given application. Fewer people involved means you are lessening the risks of failure due to human error. With Continuous Integration and Delivery, it is all but guaranteed that you will see fewer issues and greater stability as a whole. This, in turn, helps to ensure that you are minimizing the risks associated with your application and its release. 

Evolving requirements – Keeping abreast of evolving technology and market requirements is essential in order to ensure that your applications continue to function as intended. The continuous integration and delivery process allows for rapid prototyping and experimentation with new ideas and technologies. This, in turn, helps to ensure that your products remain at the forefront of industry innovation.

Flexibility – With the capability to deploy to both the cloud and on-premise servers, you can rest assured that your CI/CD process can continue even if your organization adopts the public cloud model. This is vital in today’s world where private, public, and hybrid clouds are all available and frequently utilized. In order to ensure that your process is able to continue uninterrupted, you should consider utilizing one of the many public cloud storage services that provide simple, safe, and secure access to your data. This way, your cloud-based applications will always have a place to store their data even if they are offline. It is also possible to set up automated back-ups so that your data is always safe and secure.

In summary, the benefits of Continuous Integration and Delivery are numerous. When used efficiently, they can and will result in a measurable increase in productivity and a streamlined development process that is both fast and reliable. If you’re looking for a fast, easy-to-understand guide on how to get started with CI/CD, then this blog post is for you.

Why Should You Care About CI/CD?

If you’re reading this, it’s probably because you already do care about CI/CD or are about to embark on a journey that will utilize it. Why should you care? The answer is rather simple. As previously stated, CI/CD is a tool that can be utilized to improve the quality, productivity, and reduce the overall development time of your applications. These are all valuable things. Let’s take a quick look at each one.

Quality – One of the major benefits of CI/CD is that it ensures the consistent and high-quality development of your applications. When used properly, the continuous integration and delivery process will result in the merging of multiple code changes into a single release and the elimination of any code with significant bugs. This, in turn, translates to an increased quality standard and a decrease in the number of support calls relating to technical issues.  

Productivity – Another benefit of CI/CD is that it can and often does result in an increase in the productivity of your development team. By having multiple developers working on the same codebase, having unit tests that they can run when changes are made, and being able to deploy a new version of an application with just a few clicks, this tool can and often does result in a massive increase in the productivity of your team. This, in turn, can and often does translate to an overall decrease in the time it takes to develop a new application.  

Time – Last but not least, let’s not forget about the fact that CI/CD can and often does result in a decrease in the overall time it takes to develop a new application. This is because of all the little efficiencies that come from having a streamlined process in place. For example, when everyone on your development team is using the same version of code and unit tests, it is a lot easier for them to figure out what is going on than if multiple people are separately developing different versions of the application and there are no unit tests to verify functionality. In the end, everyone will be happier with the result and it will most certainly take less time to get there.

In summary, if you’re looking for a way to improve the quality, productivity, and speed of your development process, then consider embracing Continuous Integration and Delivery.

How Do I Get Started With CI/CD?

Getting started with CI/CD is actually very simple. You should begin by defining the basic process that you will use for your software development. This can be done using either a waterfall approach or an agile development approach. The choice is entirely up to you. What is important is that you adopt a method and stick to it. Once you have your process in place, you can move on to the next step and start configuring a continuous integration tool (such as GitHub or BitBucket) and a build tool (such as Jenkins or TeamCity) to work in conjunction with it. As a minimum, you will want a GitHub repository with a test plan and a few unit tests that you can run as part of your continuous integration process. This will provide you with the basic framework for getting started with CI/CD.

What About The Automated Testing And Deployment Stages?

Automated testing and deployment are two stages of the CI/CD process that should not be omitted. Automated testing is simply testing the application (usually through execution of scripts) without human intervention. This is usually done using a combination of unit tests and integration tests. Integration tests are those that exercise the functionality of the application as a whole. Some examples of integration tests include checking the user interface or making sure that an e-commerce store operates properly across all platforms (such as mobile phones and tablets) without crashing due to a lack of features or compatibility issues.

Automated deployment is the process of pushing code to live servers (such as AWS or Azure) and have it run automatically. This stage is usually done either via a CI server or a CD server. A CI server handles the pushing of code to live servers while a CD server handles the subsequent deployment. The main difference between the two is that a CD server can handle multiple deployments whereas a CI server can only handle a single deployment at a time. This is due to the nature of the two tools being used.