CI/CD pipelines-- where CI stands for Continuous Integration and CD stands Continuous Delivery-- is a software development practice through which all developers make code changes to a central depository multiple times a day. It automates the entire software release process. The pipeline builds code, runs test cases (continuous integration), and safely deploys the new version of the Delivery application.

CI/CD is a specific way of developing a software strategy that can release updates at any time in a sustainable way. When code is shipped in a continuous routine, the development cycle is more frequent, meaningful, and faster. With the aid of continuous integration:

• Developers are emerging to merge their changes many times per day, and...
• A single change in code triggers an automated test sequence and provides instant feedback to the developer who is working on the same. Complete CI feedback runs in less than 10 minutes.

The prime motive of continuous integration is to produce changes that can be easily deployed. The automated tests are essential for the verification of souvenirs according to the version of the code.

Continuous delivery also includes provisioning of infrastructure and deployment. It may govern with a manual or multiple-stage process. What's most important is that all processes are automated with a complete visual performance. It cooperates the monitoring and automation to improve development process applications. Though the steps in CI/CD can be executed manually, the actual value of the pipeline recognizes by the automation phase.

Significance of CI and CD

CI/CD improves collaboration between the project team and customers by giving continuous feedback. It leads to more advantages in organizational management work. The following are some notable benefits of the implementation of CI and CD pipeline:

1. Cost reduction: Automation use in CI and CD pipeline helps minimize the number of errors that can occur in repetitive steps of CI and CD.
2. Faster release rate: As the failure detection is rapid, resolving minimizes, which leads to an increased release rate.
3. Minor code changes: It allows the system to integrate splitting of code at one time. This helps detect the problem before redundant work.
4. Fault isolation: It is more straightforward and quicker. Elapsed time to identify and modify output is shorter with the higher rate.
5. Reliability: The product gives good efficiency with fast features compactness. CI and CD product velocity is high.

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Workflow of CI and CD pipeline

CI/CD is a path to deliver innovative change from development to delivery. It automates software delivery services and allows to release within a short time frame.

Phase 1: Continuous integration elements as follows:

Build

For potential deployment, the source code needs to be built. Available integration tools help this phase to automate the pipeline. As considering language dependency, languages being used need to be call and execute. An example here is, calling Maven is needed to structure JAVA distribution. The building element also may be part of this step. Next example. If we need to create a Docker image of JAVA, Docker composes to be called to build it. Finally, build-oriented tests are executed and run in the build phase, where unit tests and scanning are carried out.

Infrastructure elements

In today's day, the industry is tangled with infrastructure awareness around CI and CD approaches. The right or wrong choice of structure provisioning is the gate to improve the CI & CD pipeline. If we consider artifact elements through improvement, infrastructure provisioning is used for the new environment, including Terraform script or cloud provider scripts. For example, If we notify changes.

Testing element

Major aspect while executing services is to build confidence. Test assures you of the effectiveness of service. CI and CD pipeline are natural traits that work as quality gates. Difficulties having application in required fields such as integration tests, soak tests, load tests, and regression tests. Some of the modern trends are there, including Chaos Engineering, which also improves the infrastructure level.

Release element

Release element is concerned about the actual deployment practice, which may have styles of deployment such as rolling, blue-green, and canary fashion. The release phase takes care of the arrangement CI&CD pipeline.

Validation element

Validation is a decision point in the CI and CD pipeline under which progress of the right way is validated. It continues to promote and monitor the deployment. The new era of CI&CD enhances the decisions from the multiple markers with observing and monitoring tools. Decides the progression of rollback occurs.

Let's take a short look at some deployment strategies:

1. Rolling deployment: It’s a release strategy which updated in sequence. Old is replaced by new updated version until all nodes in rows are replaced.

2. Blue-green deployment: This release strategy is intended in an application for safety purposes. With two parallel versions of production running, the new version (blue) is replaced by a stable version (green) through a load balancer that ensures the function of a stable version until it is deemed safe to decommission. Thus, blue-green deployment makes easier rollback.

3. Canary deployment: The incremental release is rolled out, ultimately replacing the stable version. For example, If the front page might swap 10% of nodes, and upon success, it improves to 50% and then finally 100% swapped.

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Characteristics of a CI and CD pipeline

Promising pipelines are fast and repeatable. The elite performance of the pipeline enhances the lead time work with a reduction in the failure rate of less than 15% in production deployment. Therefore the efficient channel can be created in less than one hour and demonstrate 95% of abnormality and regressions before reaches to end-user. If there is the failure of 2 nodes out of 10 in the pipeline, then you have to consider

Here we look at the application Example of CI and CD pipeline in Amazon Web Services,

It starts with initializing build up and deploying into Amazon EC2 instances by using AWS code pipeline, building the service, testing it, and deploying it every time according to release strategies. Then, use CodePipeline to deploy to the release process. The above example shows you how to create a pipeline for automatic deployment.

One Pager Cheat Sheet

• CI/CD pipelines are a software development practice that automates the release process with frequent and meaningful integration and delivery cycles to produce deployable changes.
• CI/CD helps to reduce cost, increase release rate, detect minor code changes, isolate faults, and ensure reliability, leading to improved collaboration between the project team and customers.
• CI/CD is an automatic process that enables faster release rates, minor code changes, fault isolation, reliability, and cost reduction.
• Using a CI/CD approach is intended to increase the release rate of code.
• Through Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Deployment (CD), it is possible to automate the delivery of software and quickly release changes with the addition of quality assurance tasks of building, infrastructure elements, validating, testing, and releasing.
• The release element of the CI/CD pipeline is the step where deployment is carried out and its arrangement is crucial for successful continuous delivery.
• A CI and CD pipeline, like in Amazon Web Services demonstrated in this example, should be fast, repeatable and have a failure rate of less than 15% in production deployment.
• Yes, the Commit, Build, Test and Deploy phases of the CI/CD pipeline allow for the commit, build, test and deploy process of code changes.