A Practical Guide to the Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) Pipeline

What is Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery CI/CD?

The practice of CI/CD (which stands for continuous integration) and continuous delivery (CD) streamlines the process of merging the efforts of multiple people into a single, coherent end result. CI/CD helps to speed up the application development and operations (DevOps) process by giving teams a central place to save their work and automation tools to build and test their code before releasing it.

What is the definition of the Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery CI/CD pipeline?

DevOps’ CI/CD pipeline is an agile approach that aims to deploy software often and reliably. Since the method is iterative rather than sequential, DevOps teams can build code, integrate it, run tests, provide releases, and deploy changes in real time.

One of the most distinguishing features of a CI/CD pipeline is the prevalence of automated checks for code quality. Test automation is used at each stage of the software development life cycle to detect dependencies and other problems early on, to push new code to stage and development environments, and to release programs to production. In this scenario, automation is tasked with performing quality assurance by evaluating several factors, such as performance, API utilization, and security. This guarantees that all of the team’s improvements are properly implemented and used.

Development teams may be able to improve quality, productivity, and other DevOps KPIs by automating the CI/CD process.

Advantages of a Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery Process

The CI/CD pipeline has many advantages, one of which is the automation of software release processes. More benefits that development teams can get from using a CI/CD workflow are as follows:

• Speeding up deployment using automated testing: By streamlining the development process, automated testing shortens the time it takes to get the software to users. Also, continuous deployment and automatic provisioning make it possible for a developer’s changes to a cloud app to go live within minutes of being written
• Faster development, testing, and production (made possible by automation) equate to less time spent on development, which translates to a lower overall cost of software development
• The CI/CD pipeline is an iterative cycle of building, testing, and deploying, with the added benefit of continuous feedback for enhancement. Developers can immediately implement the test results’ suggestions for enhancement with each new round of testing
• Continuous integration means testing is automated for each version of code created to look for issues with integration, significantly enhancing the capacity to handle error detection at an earlier stage in the development process. Finding and fixing these problems early in the process is preferable
• Together, this has the potential to greatly enhance teamwork and data sharing across systems. Each member of the team has the ability to make code modifications, hear and act on feedback, and resolve problems rapidly

What is Continuous Deployment?

Continuous Deployment refers to another aspect of the CI/CD process. Integration tests, which run the code in a cloned environment to check for bugs, are just one example of the types of tests included in continuous deployment.

Contrast: Continuous Deployment with Continuous Delivery

When it comes to releasing software or applications, the main distinction between continuous delivery and continuous deployment is the degree of automation involved. After initial testing in a development environment, the code is immediately deployed to a staging or production environment without any additional intervention from the development team. More is done automatically in continuous deployment. Once testing is done, the code goes straight to production without any further help from a person.

Whether or not a company decides to adopt continuous delivery and deployment through the CI/CD pipeline is a strategic decision based on the company’s unique requirements. DevOps teams with a short iteration cycle, such as those responsible for creating e-commerce and SaaS platforms, might benefit greatly from adopting a continuous deployment strategy. Teams can now distribute software updates and new versions on a continuous basis. Continuous deployment pipelines like this one are usually only used by DevOps teams with a tried-and-true method since changes are automatically pushed out to the public.

Teams who aren’t required to roll out updates as regularly in their process, such as those making healthcare applications, may find continuous delivery more suitable. It adds a sluggish but potentially useful extra check to make sure the end-users get what they paid for.

The steps in the continuous integration/continuous delivery pipeline

The CI/CD pipeline is the development lifecycle and workflow from source code to production. It is made up of the following steps:

Construction and compilation of code are what happens during the “Build” step of continuous integration. Teams work together to create and integrate new code from the source code. Any problems that come up are quickly found and fixed.

The testing phase is where the code is put to the test by the respective teams. Continuous delivery and deployment involve automated testing. Integration tests, unit tests, and regression tests are all examples of the kinds of validation that could be performed.

The final step, “deliver,” involves releasing the code to users. Continuous deployment automates this step right away, which is different from continuous delivery, where it is done after the developer gives permission.

The final step is to “deploy” the updated version into production. The process of continuous delivery begins with the submission of products or code to repositories, followed by the manual transfer of those items into production or deployment. That process is now fully mechanized in continuous deployment.

Installation and configuration of CI/CD instruments

Prioritizing optimization and automation of the software development process is a must when deciding on a set of CI/CD technologies. All the tools in the successful integration, testing, and deployment pipeline are open source. Your software development pipeline will only work well if your CI/CD process is set up correctly.

Jenkins is the most widely used open-source CI/CD tool. Jenkins is a Java-based automated CI server used for automating CI and CD processes and generating automated reports. CircleCI and Travis CI are two other open-source integration technologies.

Integrated development environments (IDEs) like GitHub and AWS CodeCommit aid programmers in the construction, upkeep, and management of software packages, while other platforms like GitLab aim to give the IDE as part of a more all-encompassing platform.

Teams using cloud infrastructure rely on containerization tools like Docker and orchestration systems like Kubernetes to package and distribute their applications. Kubernetes isn’t designed to be used only in the CI/CD pipeline, but it is widely integrated into such processes.

Conclusion

It’s hard to argue with the benefits of continuous integration and delivery. CI/CD can help teams deliver software faster, make releases more predictable, and reduce errors. CI/CD is a strategy that many teams are implementing. In this blog post, we’ll cover the steps of a CI/CD pipeline, how to make CI/CD work for your team, and how to measure its success.

About Enteros

​Enteros offers a patented database performance management SaaS platform. It proactively identifies root causes of complex business-impacting database scalability and performance issues across a growing number of RDBMS, NoSQL, and machine learning database platforms.