DevOps has been a buzzing word in software industry for quite a times. So what is DevOps? To explain in simple terms it bridges the gap between development, operations and IT services teams efficiently. To cultivate a DevOps culture in any company or team, implementing the right DevOps tools with the right DevOps approach is very essential and CI/CD is and integral part of DevOps engineering.
Setting up Continuous Integration / Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) process help developers and testers ship the software faster and safer. It also reduces the time and effort needed in testing and deployment of application. Once you have setup an end to end CI/CD pipeline you can release the application in fully automated way which happen on the fly.
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Understanding the CI/CD Terminology
DevOps aims at integrating the development and operations teams to enable rapid software delivery. The two main pillars of successful DevOps Culture are Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment / Continuous Delivery. So, what these terms means? Let’s find out.
CI – Continuous Integration: It aims at integrating the new codes of individual developers together into a shared version control repository like Git or SVN. This is done several time a day to detect any integration bugs at the initial stage so that it can be fixed quickly. Whenever there is a new code merge in repository, It triggers a new build and runs unit and integration tests against the new code to check for any breakage. This results in better collaboration between teams, reduces the conflict points that may occur during the deployment or release stages.
CD – Continuous Deployment / Continuous Delivery: Reliable Software Releases through Build, Test, and Deployment Automation. At the end of CI, CD starts with the focus to automate the software delivery process to enable a bug free, reliable and repeatable deployments into production at any point of time. Continuous Deployment extends Continuous Delivery so that the software build will automatically deploy if it passes all tests. At the end of CI/CD system, all the new changes will automatically get deployed into production environment without any downtime of issues.
The best of implementing the CI/CD system is that, you don’t need a person or manual intervention to check when and what goes into production. It insures all the new changes goes into various test cases, adhere to code quality and overall system health, stability and performance.