Demystifying Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery

Overview

Technology, like businesses, is rapidly evolving. Security needs and performance scalability are evolving. Continuous integration and continuous delivery are software development strategies that allow for quick programme changes while ensuring system stability and security.

DevOps is a set of cultural concepts, processes, and tools that improves an organization's capacity to provide applications and services at a rapid pace. Firms that adopt DevOps concepts can evolve and improve products faster than organisations that use traditional software development and infrastructure management techniques. This speed allows firms to better service their clients and compete in the market.

What is continuous integration and continuous delivery/deployment?

cicd

Continuous integration

Continuous integration (CI) is a software development process in which developers integrate their code changes into a central repository on a frequent basis, following which automated builds and tests are executed.

The build or integration stage of the software release process is most commonly referred to as CI, and it necessitates both an automated component (such as a CI or build service) and a cultural component (for example learning to integrate frequently).

The primary goals of CI are to detect and fix issues faster, to enhance software quality, and to shorten the time it takes to validate and release new software upgrades.

Continuous integration focuses on integrating smaller pushes and code changes. A developer commits code on a regular basis, at least once per day. Before submitting to the build server, the developer pulls code from the code repository to check that the code on the local host is merged. The build server performs the various tests at this point and either approves or rejects the code change.

Continuous delivery and deployment

Continuous delivery can be defined as the process of distributing software to end users. The basic purpose of continuous delivery is to achieve this. As a result, we can ensure that the programme is always available to end users.

It is a software development method in which code changes are built, tested, and prepared for production release automatically.

With Continuous deployment, revisions are deployed to the server as soon as they are ready. It makes the entire process of deploying software faster and easier.

For example, if you have a project that has a web application that you want to deploy to a server, you can use a CI/CD pipeline to do the following:

Pull code from the repository
Build a container from the code
Create the deployment package (or artifact)
Push the deployment package to the server
Make the deployment package available to end users

Continuous delivery is concerned with business processes rather than technology. Continuous deployment is more concerned with software deployment than with business procedures.

In the next blog article, I'll talk about the benefits of Continuous delivery and Continuous deployment and how to implement them in your organisation.

Thanks for reading! Reach out to me on Twitter if you have any questions or comments.

References

AWS documentation
Uncle Google