What Is CI/CD?
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“The earlier you catch defects, the cheaper they are to fix.”
– David Farley
A very popular way to achieve the above-mentioned goal is through CI/CD, a modern DevOps practice that accelerates software delivery through continuous integration, delivery, and deployment. It enables development teams to release high-quality applications faster by automating build, test, and deployment workflows.
By integrating code changes frequently and validating them through automated testing, CI/CD reduces risks and improves collaboration between development and operations teams. This streamlined pipeline not only enhances software quality but also ensures faster feedback, quicker releases, and greater business agility.
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What Is CI?
CI stands for “continuous integration” and is the preliminary phase of the CI/CD pipeline. Continuous integration is the stage where developers integrate code into a shared repository frequently, such as several times a day. They verify each of these integrations with automated builds and automated tests.
Imagine an e-commerce company with 15 developers working simultaneously on features like payment gateway improvements, discount logic, and product search optimization. Without CI, developers might merge all changes at the end of a sprint. If something breaks, it becomes difficult to identify which change caused the issue. With CI, each small change is merged and validated immediately, making bug detection faster and less expensive.
Although continuous integration doesn’t eliminate bugs, it makes it dramatically easier to find and remove them. This phase is followed by testing, the continuous delivery process, and deployment.
In this article, we’ll delve deep into the CI/CD pipeline, see how it relates to DevOps, and explore tools that developers can use in the CI/CD environment.
What is the CI/CD pipeline?
- Continuous Integration
- Continuous Delivery
- Continuous Deployment
- Discover and eliminate potential bugs and defects early in the software development cycle.
- Push code changes from multiple developers to different environments.
- Deliver approved applications to the production environments.
- And ensure quality control across all things, from assessing performance to API and security.
- Build: This is a continuous integration phase where development teams build off of source code and integrate new code.
- Test: In both the continuous delivery and deployment stages, development teams test using automated processes. Read: Shift Left Testing – Software Testing Done Early
- Deliver: This is an automated stage where the approved codebase is sent to the production environment. It is carried out with the developer’s approval in continuous delivery and sans human intervention in continuous deployment.
- Deploy: The deployment is where the final product is pushed to production and is automated.
Continuous Integration
Continuous Integration (CI) is an agile and DevOps software application development practice, where all developers’ code and working copies are merged to a version control code repository, early and frequently. The main objective of this exercise is to expedite the integration process early on, instead of waiting till the end of a sprint or a release to merge the work of all developers.
Continuous integration is a prerequisite for the continuous framework methodology since it not only builds the code but also carries out the unit and integration testing. The benefits of CI include enabling teams to improve code quality, enhance security, and meet business requirements by automating deployment.
Continuous Delivery
Continuous delivery is an automated approach that pushes applications to the delivery environments. Here, development teams supply the validated code changes (all updates, new features, and bug fixes) performed in continuous integration to specific code repositories such as GitHub.
Automation plays a vital role in continuous delivery and helps development teams deploy code, scale software, and reduce the deployment cost and time. For instance, an online education platform introducing a new quiz feature can automatically push the feature to a staging environment where product managers validate functionality before approving production release.
Continuous Deployment
The last phase of the continuous framework is continuous deployment. It is an extension of continuous delivery and differs from it by automating the software release of a production-ready build to a code repository.
Unlike continuous delivery, where, after the developer’s approval, the code is pushed to production, continuous deployment depends on well-designed test automation to go live. Here, no manual intervention occurs before production. So, if the code passes automated testing, then continuous deployment would push a developer’s code changes to a cloud application within minutes of scripting. This way, continuously receiving and incorporating feedback becomes easy.
Instead of releasing changes to apps all at once, the CI/CD methodology makes the deployment less risky by releasing changes in small pieces. It can be expensive at first to build automated tests, but that upfront investment does pay off in the long run by autonomously accommodating a variety of test cases and release processes.
How does CI/CD relate to DevOps?
DevOps comprises tools and practices that are designed precisely to accelerate the delivery of applications and services as compared to traditional software development processes. And the CI/CD pipeline comes under the broad framework of DevOps. The accelerated speed of DevOps helps businesses to serve their customers better and also be more competitive in the market. For example, in a DevOps-driven organization, developers, QA engineers, and operations teams collaborate using shared dashboards and automated pipelines to ensure faster, safer releases.
Where organizations bake security into all phases of the software development life cycle, in a DevOps environment, it is called DevSecOps. It ensures that security protocols are integrated into all DevOps workflows. Even in the CI/CD pipeline, the security tools must fit seamlessly to keep pace with DevOps and not lag the development velocity. Packaging security helps organizations catch vulnerabilities early on and helps make informed decisions on risk and mitigation.
Common CI/CD Tools
Organizations need tools that prevent points of friction and slow down integration and delivery for the successful implementation and execution of a CI/CD pipeline. Various CI/CD open source and proprietary tools assist development teams in automating integration, development, deployment, and testing.
Certain tools are designed to specifically handle continuous integration, some to manage development and deployment (CD), and others, like testRigor, specialize in continuous testing and related functions.
- Jenkins: An automation server that is designed to handle everything from a simple continuous integration server to a complete continuous delivery and deployment hub.
- Tekton Pipelines: A CI/CD framework built for Kubernetes platforms, offering a standard cloud-native experience with containers.
- Spinnaker: A continuous delivery tool for releasing software changes targeted towards multi-cloud platforms.
DevOps teams can also consider managed CI/CD tools offered by various vendors. GitLab, TravisCI, CircleCI, Azure DevOps, AWS CodeBuild, and many others are major public cloud providers that offer CI/CD solutions.
Furthermore, tools like Ansible, Docker, and Kubernetes help teams manage configuration automation, container runtimes, and container orchestration, respectively. They aren’t strictly CI/CD tools, but assist in many CI/CD processes.
Why CI/CD Is Impossible to Achieve with Manual Testing
All build releases have to be tested each time before delivery to ensure the quality of the software being delivered. But the short release cycle of CI/CD pressures the QA to test faster. And every release has to undergo four levels of testing: unit testing, integration testing, system testing, and acceptance testing. With manual testing, this is a seemingly difficult task.
That’s why testing has to be automated to match the pace of agile, DevOps, and the CI/CD pipeline, to ensure speedy delivery of software. Here’s where intelligent automation testing software like testRigor alleviates the burden on manual QA.
testRigor has scripts that can integrate with any CI/CD tool for either Ubuntu, Linux, or Windows. Here’s a demonstration video on how you could integrate your GitHub repository with testRigor’s test suite to carry out automated testing.
Simplify the CI/CD Pipeline with testRigor
CI/CD pipeline enables businesses to frequently deliver applications and services to customers by introducing automation. This framework begins with continuous integration and moves to continuous delivery and deployment, and continuous testing to validate QA.
CI/CD solves the troubles that arise between development and operations teams while integrating new code. But you cannot achieve CI/CD without automating testing. Look no further than testRigor to run stable tests — in plain English. It integrates with all CI/CD systems like Jenkins, CircleCI, Azure DevOps, Gitlab CI, GitHub Actions, and others.
Want to see your engineering team move faster with pre-generated copy-paste-ready bash scripts? Request a personalized demo or start your free open-source project with testRigor.
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