What is CI/CD?

In this section, we’ll learn about what continuous integration and continuous deployment mean to developers.

Continuous Integration (CI) is the process of merging all developers’ code into a mainline to trigger an automatic build process so that you can quickly identify issues with a code base using unit tests and code analysis.

When a developer checks their code into a branch, it’s reviewed by peer developers. Once accepted, it’s merged into a mainline and automatically starts a build process. This build process will be covered shortly.

Continuous Deployment (CD) is the process of consistently creating software to deploy it at any time.

Once everything has been built through the automated process, the build prepares the compiled code and creates artifacts. These artifacts are used for consistent deployments across various environments, such as development, staging, and production.

The benefits of implementing a CI/CD pipeline outweigh not having one:

• Automated Testing: When a commit is triggered, your tests are automatically executed along with your build. Think of this as someone always checking your code on commit.
• Faster Feedback Loops: As a developer, it’s always great to receive immediate feedback to find out whether something works or not. If you receive an email where the build broke, you’re on your own.
• Consistent Builds: Once you have a project being built on a build server, you can create builds on-demand – and consistently – with tests.
• Collaboration Between Teams: We’re all in this together and CI/CD includes developers, system administrators, project managers/SCRUM masters, and QA testers, to name a few, to accomplish the goal of creating great software.

In this section, we reviewed the definition of what continuous integration and continuous deployment mean when developing software in an automated fashion and the benefits of implementing a CI/CD pipeline.

In the next section, we’ll learn about certain code practices to avoid when automating software builds.