Contact us anytime to know more — Amit A., Founder & COO CISIN
Application development teams use continuous integration (CI) and Delivery (CD), or CI/CD, as a strategy for more quickly and reliably releasing code updates.
CI/CD stands for continuous integration and Delivery.
Continuous Integration/Delivery (CI/CD) is one of the best practices for agile teams and DevOps teams methodologies alike.
Software development teams can focus on meeting business requirements while guaranteeing their software remains secure and high-quality thanks to automated continuous Integration/Delivery processes such as Continuous Integration/Delivery.
What Is The CI/CD Pipeline?
At its core, a continuous integration/continuous deployment pipeline (CI/CD pipeline) is a workflow designed to automate the development, testing, integration, and Delivery of high-quality software.
Code changes are committed to the source code repository, where they undergo optimization of software release cycles until they reach runtime environments.
Due to the modern software development process necessitating the use of multiple environments (dev, stage, and prod), creating a manual workflow that attempts to meet similar objectives as that achieved via continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD pipeline) can be extremely time-consuming and unscalable.
Fundamental concepts related to continuous integration and continuous Delivery (CI/CD) pipelines need to be kept in mind in order to grasp CI/CD strategies fully.
What Is Continuous Integration?
Continuous Integration (CI), as the initial stage in any CI/CD pipeline, involves both building an application and conducting automated tests to validate it against quality standards.
Although each set has its own goals, continuous integration's primary purpose should be ensuring all newly committed source codes meet them all.
What Is Continuous Delivery?
Continuous Delivery can be seen as the continuation of continuous integration (CI). Software developed and tested during the CI stage is the cornerstone of constant Delivery.
Also included herein is an outline for the software's release; this plan does require human involvement - teams can set schedules that release it daily, weekly, or at another agreed-upon interval by simply pressing a button.
Once it is activated, your application will automatically deploy into its designated environment.
Continuous Delivery vs. Continuous Deployment
Continuous deployment practice sees all successful changes that make their way through each stage or phase of pipeline deployment to runtime environments as part of its constant deployment practice.
As opposed to continuous Delivery, which involves human involvement for release day schedules and software releases, continuous deployment lets software release even quicker than before.
Phases of CI/CD Pipeline
Realistically, CI/CD pipelines depend on various elements relating to an app, such as the type of application being developed, code repository organization and architecture, as well as any other vital aspects of software projects.
Following are several universal concepts commonly seen in Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery pipelines and are discussed further:
Source Stage
This initial stage entails pulling together all of the source code that will form part of a pipeline. With version control systems such as Git, this typically happens by extracting code from one of its branches - either through creating a pull request, merging branches directly, or pushing code now to certain repository branches to begin this phase.
Compile Or Build Stage
At this step, the application is built or compiled utilizing the code used in the source phase - mirroring exactly the steps developers would typically follow when collecting an app locally.
To ensure a smooth build process, the application dependencies must be installed exactly like they would be on a developer's workstation.
Other key runtime dependencies must also be specified; for instance, you should ensure Docker is installed during the build runtime of a continuous integration tool when developing a Docker application.
To ensure the build phase contains the appropriate software tools and dependencies, continuous integration (CI) tools often offer templates for build stages that provide proper build stages for applications.
Additionally, during this stage of the development cycle, the code will typically be packaged up ready for Delivery and deployment; however, some pipelines have an extra step where code is packaged up as an artefact prior to being sent out the door.
Test Stage
As its name implies, this stage involves running various automated tests: static code analysis, unit testing, functional testing, acceptance testing, integration testing, and API testing are just a few forms.
Their goal is to make sure the code committed meets a certain standard without creating issues due to poor code writing practices.
Deploy Or Deliver Stage
At this final step of CI/CD pipeline development, your source code can either be released manually by pressing a button or automatically deployed after it has passed all necessary tests and been successfully built and deployed into its runtime environment.
How To Ship Code Faster
As modern software systems have grown more complex and distributed, visibility into infrastructure layers has become ever more crucial to their successful deployment into runtime environments.
Continuous Integration and Delivery (CI/CD) pipelines require software teams to quickly locate, track, isolate, and address specific sections of recently released code in order to address potential problems - an essential aspect of infrastructure monitoring.
Teams increasingly rely on infrastructure monitoring tools to keep an eye on various technical architecture components such as virtual machines, servers, containers, and more.
Teams can respond more rapidly, accurately, and even proactively when infrastructure problems and incidents are detected through monitoring components like Middleware.
Furthermore, monitoring platforms allow teams to troubleshoot, optimize, and forecast issues more easily with your infrastructure monitoring strategy by improving how efficiently issues are troubleshot, optimized, or forecasted.
Middleware's infrastructure monitoring, which targets underperforming components of software to address bugs and issues during the continuous development lifecycle effectively, supports velocity and quality objectives of continuous integration/continuous delivery pipelines when shipping code.
Benefits Of The CI/CD Pipeline
CI/CD pipelines have quickly become the industry-standard method for software development lifecycle and release across businesses, both large and small, from startups to enterprises alike.
Let's consider some of its primary benefits of CI/CD that have fuelled its widespread implementation.
Faster Software Releases
When it comes to software delivery, continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipelines attempt to address velocity as their chief issue.
Their shortcomings were one major contributor to DevOps becoming mainstream as an overall concept. Due to silos between application developers and IT operations, software shipping workflow was marked by extremely long turnaround times.
Silos often lead to communication and collaboration breakdown, leading to inefficient working practices and slow processes.
Conversely, CI/CD pipelines automate workflow and speed the process significantly by uniting both team's feedback to developers and operators in harmony and collaboration.
Improved Software Quality
Quality gates should be employed at primary source code repositories to reduce software errors and malfunctions, making automated testing a valuable tool in this regard.
Continuous integration/continuous delivery pipelines play an invaluable role here; not only can this streamline software delivery to customers faster, but teams and businesses benefit by setting and upholding an established quality standard effectively.
More Efficient Workflows
With continuous integration/continuous deployment pipelines, teams can produce better code more quickly while streamlining their workflow.
Software teams no longer need to perform repetitive tasks manually or work with external teams to ship code, thanks to automation and optimization provided by these pipelines. Once the pipeline has been created, any further adjustments tend to be minimal; teams can dedicate more time and resources towards application optimization due to enhanced workflow efficiency.
Cost-Effective Workflows
Businesses and software teams can reduce expenses by opting for continuous integration/continuous delivery pipelines over more conventional approaches like manual methods that rely heavily on human intervention but lack effectiveness.
Companies can reduce overhead for larger teams that don't contribute much towards improving software shipping workflow by having teams automate through pipelines.
Quicker Developer Feedback Loop
Since continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) pipelines are fast, software teams can receive feedback faster on recently committed changes, therefore being better equipped to identify problems promptly.
Quicker Delivery Of Goods To Clients
CI/CD pipelines create an instantaneous feedback loop that benefits end users as well as agile development teams, shortening both time-to-market (MTTT) and time-to-repair (MTTR) by alerting all necessary parties of issues with their systems.
Conclusion
Continuous Integration packages and tests software builds, alerting developer tools when any changes they make fail unit tests.
Continuous Delivery tools involve automating the deployment of apps, services, and technology onto runtime infrastructure with possible additional testing steps; both processes take place simultaneously.
Establishing a Continuous Integration and Delivery pipeline has become standard practice among companies seeking reliable application delivery processes that focus more on improving applications than managing deployment in various environments.
Once implemented, such channels allow team members to concentrate their attention more directly on enhancing those applications rather than worrying about deployment logistics.
