Introduction to continuous integration
The idea behind the term CI is that new code is continuously integrated with existing code, which results in a system that can be shipped to production at any time (or at least this is the intention).
The route from software development to production is referred to as the release pipeline, where the code passes through multiple processes to reach production, such as compiling the code, deploying the binaries on the dev environment, allowing a QA to pull the code to a certain environment, and others. CI is an integral part of the release pipeline.
A CI system requires a host so that it can do various operations on the code. The host is a combination of a server and an operating system:
Figure 11.1 – CI server in an OS
Here are a few examples of on-premise CI servers:
- Cruise Control
- Team City
- Team Foundation Server (TFS)
- Jenkins
- Octopus Deploy
You will be able to find a SaaS solution...