Devops automation by continuous integration and continuous deployment
In today’s fast-moving software development industry, providing updates and enhancements to users promptly and dependably is a crucial advantage. The push for swift, reliable, and top-notch software distribution is no longer just a target but a requirement, leading to the widespread embrace of CI/CD, integral elements of Agile and DevOps methodologies.
What is CI/CD ?
We all know that ” CI/CD ” stands for continuous integration and continuous delivery/deployment, which aims to streamline and accelerate the software development lifecycle.
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The collaborative processes are commonly known as a “CI/CD pipeline” and are backed by teams from development teams and operations teams collaborating in an agile manner using either a DevOps approach or site reliability engineering (SRE) approach.
In simple terms,
“ In software development process, the software undergoes through three main phases – BUILD, TEST, and DEPLOY. The main purpose of CI CD is getting the product into the market with less time by bridging the gap between developers and users”.
Why we need CONTINUOUS INTEGRATION (ci) in MODERN APPLICATION DEVELOPMENT?
In this era, modern application development aim is to enable multiple developers to collaborate on various features of the same application simultaneously. In case if an organization is set up to merge all branching source code together on one day. (Merging activity happens on one specific day) the resulting work output can be complex, manual, and time intensive. This occurs because if a developer modifies an application on their own, it may clash with changes made by other developers at the same time. The issue can escalate if each developer has personalized their own local IDE instead of using a team-approved cloud-based IDE. “CI (Continuous Integration) can be seen as a way to address the issue of managing multiple conflicting branches of an application under development simultaneously “.
Continuous integration :
CI stands for continuous integration, and it involves building, testing, and checking code whenever developers commit changes to a repository to ensure seamless integration with the project’s existing code base.
CD: (Continuous delivery or Continuous deployment) :
The term CD may refer to either continuous deployment or continuous delivery, CD is the next phase after successful completion of CI processes. CI-CD both are for automating the further process of continuous Integration, but they’re sometimes used separately to illustrate just how much automation is happening.
CD in CI/CD refers to continuous delivery or continuous deployment, often used interchangeably, focusing on automating pipeline stages with a choice based on risk tolerance and specific team needs.
How Does a CI/CD Pipeline Work?
There are 3 stages in CI-CD i.e. Build , Test , Deploy
BUILD:
After completing a feature, fixing a bug, or making significant code changes, developers merge these modifications into the main branch of the code repository, Main branch repository represents the latest stable version of the project / Software. Every time a code is committed, the CI system initiates a build process automatically, which includes converting source code into usable artifacts. The build step is crucial as it make sure that there are no compilation errors in the codebase.
TEST:
Then coming to post build stage, the CI system automatically initiates a series of tests on the built software/code to check for errors, bugs, and other issues. In simple terms this is the phase, which ensures that software code / project is functioning as expected and finds any bugs or issues in behaviour.
Probably you can check some common tests like Unit test, Integration test and Performance test.
DEPLOY:
Once the software has been through the build and test stages of the CI/CD pipeline. It goes into third phase “DEPLOY “, which is nothing but a final stage. This stage is where the verified and tested software gets delivered to various environments, including test, staging, and production. In a continuous deployment setup, any update that successfully goes through the CI stage gets automatically pushed to the production environment. Under continuous delivery, the changes are ready for deployment and can be released to production, but there might be a manual step required for the final release, where the manual intervention needs to be ensured with technical and business requirements.
Continuous Delivery vs Continuous Deployment.
- Continuous deployment automatically deploys every change passing automated tests to production.
- Continuous delivery is similar but relies on human intervention for the final release to production.
- Continuous delivery does not include automated production deployment, whereas continuous deployment automatically deploys updates to the production environment.
Why CI-CD is important?
The primary concept of CI/CD is to automate the process of delivering software, which results in quicker production and higher quality code. This also allows for faster feedback and ultimately reduces the time to market for the product.
CI/CD enables companies to efficiently release software at a rapid pace. It establishes a streamlined process for faster product deployment, consistently delivering code to production, and ensuring a continuous stream of new features and bug fixes through the most effective delivery approach.CI/CD helps organizations avoid bugs and code failures while maintaining a continuous cycle of software development and updates.
CI-CD tools listed below :
Jenkins , Gitlab , Bitbucket , Team city , Circle ci and many more available in the market
Thank you :)!