Today, CI/CD pipeline is hailed as one of the most important and beneficial practices for DevOps teams when it comes to delivering the code changes in a more reliable and quicker manner. Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery (CD) refer to a set of operational principles, or basically a culture of following certain practices that enables development teams to deliver changes in the code more frequently and in a more reliable fashion.

CI/CD is an irreplaceable part of any development approach, irrelevant of what framework you are using, the tech stack or what your development practices are. The value addition of CI/CD is faster delivery, less deployment overhead to your development team. It enables you to deliver value in a quick, safe, and repeatable manner.

Purpose of CI/CD

Continuous Integration is a coding philosophy and group of practices. Their purpose is to enable the development teams to make small changes to the code and serves as a mechanism to integrate and validate those changes.

The purpose of CI is to automate your build pipeline. It is dependent on the tech stack that you are using. However, it enables your development teams to integrate your features, development changes in an automated way. It helps them to increase code quality, reduce errors and potential conflicts & deliver more value in less time.

Continuous Delivery comes into play where continuous integration exits the scene. It automates the process of application delivery to infrastructure environments. Basically, CD enables your operation team to integrate the end result over multiple environments. This way you can test your changes in multiple phases and make sure that we are getting value out of it. CD enables us to operationalize log aggregation, monitoring and other components. This is required for making sure smooth working of our end result.

CI Approach:

  1. Improve the code quality: We can run the test cases and make sure that our code coverage is up to the par. We also can use static code analysis tools like sonarQube and codecy. This will be helpful to make sure that coding standards are maintained throughout the development process
  2. Avoiding the code maintenance issues: One of the efficient ways to do this is to merge your code in the main/master branch frequently. This way, we can avoid last minute maintenance issues in code
  3. Make sure that we enable automated testing and build deployment processes in the initial environments. This makes sure that we catch the issues early and improve the quality of code at faster pace.

CD Approach:

  1. It’s best to follow a  fail fast strategy in lower environments. This enables us to catch issues early on which increase stability in higher environments
  2. Set up release & rollback strategy for each environment build. Things go wrong and we need to make sure that we have a plan in handy. In most of the cases, solution is move back to previous build artefacts .

CI/CD: Conclusion

So, we can see that CI/CD and its implementation requires the operations teams and the development teams to properly collaborate. This means they have to come together on technologies, priorities and practices. The different teams will have to build a consensus on which approach and technology they want to choose for their business. This is essential in order to make sure there is uniformity in following practices once CI/CD is in place.

If you would like to know more about CI/CD at EmbarkingonVoyage, please get in touch with us at info@embarkingonvoyage.com. We will be happy to help!