CI and CD
CI and CD are widely used processes and tools in modern software development and ALM practices. The CI pipeline (workflow) is for compiling the source code and generating the binaries using build agents, whereas the CD pipeline takes those binaries and deploys them, the entire solution with its configuration to different environments, like dev, test, or production.
CI is sometimes referred to as CI builds because it eventually does the official compilation of source code on dedicated build machines (sometimes they are just Docker containers). During CI builds, unit tests are also executed; those tests require no orchestration of the application and run in the millisecond range. CI is one of the greatest processes to assure software quality and to avoid the regression of our applications. In the case of large development projects, it is also very common to create build farms consisting of hundreds of build machines to generate deliverables or packages on every code change...
