The most significant characteristic is the ability to automate your builds, testing, and development so you can ship code changes in a faster and more reliable way.
Automation is a core principle for achieving DevOps success and CI/CD is a critical component. CI/CD comprises continuous integration and continuous delivery or continuous deployment. Put together, they form a “CI/CD pipeline”—a series of automated workflows that help DevOps teams cut down on manual tasks:
Continuous delivery or continuous deployment? Which one is better?
When using continuous delivery, automation pauses when developers push to production. It automates the entire release process. As soon as all required tests pass, code changes are immediately deployed to the customers.
It is the best example of DevOps automation. Continuous deployment relies on rigorous testing tools and mature testing culture. That’s why most software teams start with continuous delivery and integrate more automated testing over time.
Why choose CI/CD?
It’s simple – speed. Organizations that have “mastered” CI/CD deploy 208 times more often and have a lead time that is 106 times faster than the rest.
Stability and reliability
The codebases remain stable and ready to be released at any time.
Business growth
Once they are freed up from manual tasks, all the organizations can focus resources on development and improvement.
Buzzfeed
CI/CD are made a part of the development workflow with a combination of automated processes, steps, and tools.
Version control
CI begins its work in shared repositories, where teams collaborate on code using version control systems (VCS) which keeps track of code changes. It enables configuration as code, and in this way it allows teams to manage testing, infrastructure, and more as versioned artifacts.
Builds
Those tools package up files and components automatically. Once after clearing all the required checks, CD tools send builds off to the operations team for further testing and staging.
Reviews and approvals
In a CI/CD workflow, a code is being reviewed and approved in pull requests or leveraging integrated development environments for pair programming.
Environments
CI/CD tests and deploys code in environments, where a code is being built by developers. After that, applications become publicly available by operations teams. They have different protection rules and specific variables.
How does it work?
Firstly, developers have to open pull requests in order to trigger initial builds and unit tests. Secondly, the approved commits are deployed to a preview environment. After that, the mabl CLI is being installed by Custom-built GitHub Actions and run headless tests. Then, live check results are being provided by GitHub Apps. Finally, approved commits are merged to the main branch for additional tests or deployed to production.
Why is CI/CD so successful?
Automation
It can be done manually, but the automation makes it easier to build, test, and deploy, in order to have more time for coding.
Transparency
If something goes wrong and suddenly a build fails, developers need to be able to quickly assess what went wrong and why. Logs, visual workflow builders, and deeply integrated tooling make it easier for developers to troubleshoot, understand complex workflows, and share their status with the larger team.
Speed
CI/CD helps your overall performance. The speed is being measured based on two indicators. The first one is how quickly commits are made to code in production and the second one is how often you commit code.
Resilience
CI/CD makes the software more resistant to errors. The stability is measured by DORA and its aim is to check how quickly incidents are resolved and change failure rate.
Security
CI/CD pipeline has been checked in place for code and permissions. It provides a virtual paper trail for auditing failures, security breaches, and non-compliance events.
