Understanding Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD)

What is CI/CD

Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CICD) are terms used to describe a process where multiple changes are made to a codebase simultaneously.

In very simple words, CI is a modern tool for development practice in which code changes are made frequently. Automated build-and-deploy steps triggered by CI confirm that code changes being merged into the repository. The code is delivered quickly and run seamlessly as a part of the continuous deployment process. In the software world, the CI/CD pipeline refers to the automation that enables incremental code changes from developers’ desktops to be delivered quickly and reliably to production.

What are the benefits of CI/CD

• Automated testing enables continuous delivery, which ensures software quality and security. It increases the effectiveness of code in production level.
• CI/CD pipelines can deploy new product features in shortest time.
• The great increase in overall speed of delivery enabled by CI/CD pipelines improves an organization’s competitive edge.
• Automation frees team members to focus on what they do best, resulting in the best end products.
• Finding and fixing bugs late in the development process is expensive and time-consuming. This is especially true when there are issues with features that have already been released to production.
• With a CI/CD pipeline, you can test and deploy code more frequently, giving testers the ability to detect issues as soon as they occur and to fix them immediately. You are essentially mitigating risks in real-time.
• Teams can build, test and deploy features automatically without user intervention.
• The biggest advantages of a CI/CD pipeline is you can roll back changes quickly. If any new code changes fails the production application, you can immediately return the application to its previous state. Usually, the last successful build gets immediately deployed to prevent production interruption.

Limitations of CI/CD

• The businesses have to be alert and iterative enough. Avoid the wrong automation process done first and be extra cautious in picking the right order of process.
• The code base has to be ready and immediately put into production once the current result is successful. This immediacy can lead to panic in businesses.
• The teams may make a dashboard that not every member knows beforehand. This results in falling prey to a logical fallacy.
• As CI and CD are coordinated, they have to be implemented in sync with each other. A lot of attention and detail with respect to human factors is required to get them going.

Popular CI/CD tools

Jenkins: Open source automation server for facilitating CI and CD.

Spinnaker: An Open Source tool for Continuous Code analysis that helps source code high quality.

GoCD: Helps Automate build, test and continuous delivery.

CircleCI: Is an enterprise level solution automatically Implementing CI and CD.

AWS codebuild: Fully Automated continuous integration service.

Best CI/CD practices

Based on the Experience, here are some of the best practices that ensure the success of your CI/CD pipeline:

• Every developer adds code to the central repository (GIT) at least daily
• If the automated testing shows some error, and the bug is detected and fixed within ten minutes.

Continuous integration, and continuous delivery, and deployment should be the focus if you need a successful CI/CD. The best CD is done with minimal tools.

CI/CD will work best when you:

• Ensure continuous delivery
• Easy Feedback receiving mechanism which can help developers find out mistakes in code before deploying.
• Monitoring helps organization to save money and time.

Implementation of CI/CD at Zipy

Recently Zipy included CI/CD in its environment, so that developers can deploy their feature update in the shortest possible time. It also helps developers to focus on code development.

Conclusion

Continuous integration and continuous delivery gives you an ideal situation to your organization application teams. Your developers easily push their code to a repository. This code will be integrated, tested, deployed, tested again, merged with infrastructure, go through security and quality reviews, and be ready to deploy with extremely high confidence.

When CI/CD is used, code quality can be improved and software updates are delivered quickly and this give developers a high degree of confidence.