What is CI/CD? Continuous Integration & Delivery Explained

IT organizations that have implemented agile processes and transformations or migrated to the cloud place a high value on what they call DX (developer experience).

This improves productivity and quality of product development. Implementing CI/CD is a priority to enable faster build, delivery and deployment cycles, it helps automate tasks, and it aligns with DevOps culture. Below is a detailed analysis of what CI/CD and related concepts are.

Creating a seamless developer experience in software development has the major indirect benefit of leading a company to growth and increased efficiency. CI/CD together help understand this flow of developer experience and improve productivity. In its full form, these terms mean continuous integration, continuous delivery and continuous deployment. This model is integral to the adoption of a DevOps culture, which in turn aims to ensure faster time to market and customer satisfaction. According to Dzone's State of CI and CD report, organizations adopting a DevOps culture are increasingly using this model to create SaaS products.



FAQ

In the context of software development, continuous integration refers to the build and unit testing phases. An automatic build and test are started for each revision that is committed. Code changes are automatically built, tested, and prepared for a production release with continuous delivery.

The ideal approach for software development that adheres to a number of crucial principles is continuous integration. Revision control, automated testing, and build automation are a few of the CI tenets.

The Principles of Continuous Integration include:

  • Maintain a single source repository.
  • Automate the build.
  • Make your build self-testing.
  • Every commit should build on an integration machine.
  • Keep the build fast.
  • Test in a clone of the production environment (staging)

The following are the fundamental requirements for performing continuous integration:

  • Automating builds.
  • Automating evaluations.
  • Adding to a single source code repository more frequently.
  • Giving the team immediate access to the CI status and process visibility.

For every Agile Release Train, continuous integration is a crucial technical practice (ART). It raises standards, lowers risk, and establishes a rapid, dependable, and long-term rate of development. With continuous integration, the "system always runs," which means it may be deployed, even while under development.

Continuous integration helps developers create software more quickly, safely, and easily. Developers may confidently commit smaller changes by automating builds and tests. Software developers receive feedback on their code more quickly, which quickens innovation in general.

The main disadvantages of continuous integration are:

  • Conversion of well-known procedures
  • Needs more servers and environments.
  • The creation of appropriate test protocols is required.
  • When several developers wish to integrate their work at the same time, there may be delays.

The entire software release process is automated through continuous delivery. Every time a revision is committed, an automatic flow is started that builds, tests, and stages the update. The developer is the one who ultimately decides whether to deploy to a real-world production environment.

All phases of the software release process are automated through continuous delivery. An automated sequence that builds, tests, and then stages the update is started whenever a revision is committed. The developer initiates the ultimate choice to deploy to a real-world production environment.


Next Insight:
eCommerce Security

Categories

Drop a line

Contacts

We’d love to know more about your business and how we can help. Let’s connect!

  • United States, +1 (415) 799-11-13
  • Belgum, +32 (466) 90-10-63
  • Sweden, +46 (812) 111-480
  • Ukraine, +38 (066) 710-79-76