Modern software development relies on speed. Waterfall’s monolithic all-or-nothing approach has been mostly displaced by quick iterative practices that facilitate development and deployment — continuous integration (CI), continuous delivery (CD), and continuous deployment (CD).
While each practice has its own advantages, the common emphasis on continuous iteration has transformed the essence of software development. Companies can deliver software to the market faster, test new features more efficiently, and lower risk and cost.
This type of iteration relies on thorough planning and active pipelines that support multiple iterations at different phases of the development cycle, keeping the entire development team involved. While one build is deployed, the next is being tested, and the new build in the cycle is being developed.
If you’re in an IT-related business, knowing how to use the CI/CD pipeline is crucial to keep your company competitive. Here is what you need to know about CI/CD practices and why they matter.
What Is a CI/CD Pipeline?
“CI/CD” stands for the combined practices of Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery (CD).
It’s a software development approach that allows you to deliver upgrades at any time and in a sustainable manner. Development cycles are more frequent, impactful, and faster when code changes are routine.
In CI, developers merge code changes in a central repository multiple times a day. The goal is to create a deployable artifact. CD adds the practice of automating the entire software release process.Automated tests are used to ensure that the artifact for a given version of code is safe to deploy.
In Continuous Delivery, code changes are also continuously deployed, although the deployments are initiated manually.
Most teams work in environments other than production, such as development and testing, and CD ensures that code changes are automatically pushed to those environments. If the entire process of moving code from the source repository to production is fully automated, the process is called Continuous Deployment.
Benefits of CI/CD Pipeline
CI/CD is more than just task automation to avoid human mistakes. It allows companies to deliver innovative solutions to users as quickly and efficiently as possible.
- Better collaboration and quality. The rationale behind the CI/CD pipeline is that it is easier to find bugs on smaller code differentials rather than larger ones that have been produced over a long period of time. Furthermore, when developers work on shorter commit cycles, they are less likely to be editing the same code at the same time.
- Improved stability and fewer bugs. The CI/CD pipeline allows building code simultaneously, lowering the risk of a build failure. It’s easier to isolate and eradicate bugs with smaller releases and automated test cycles. Teams can also utilize feature flags without having to use code to easily disable specific functionality that isn’t ready or can cause an unforeseen problem.
- Software delivery with less risk. Pipelines for continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) standardize release processes across projects. You limit the chances of creating bugs by testing every change in the source code.
- Frequent release of new features. A CI/CD pipeline can visualize the whole path from commit to production in a single screen, allowing you to navigate across stages, identify inefficiencies, and improve the workflow. By eliminating the roadblocks to efficiency, you lead your product to success.
- A product that users need. Frequent updates often mean more feedback from users. A/B testing features or testing early versions of products with real customers are two ways to take advantage of this. This way, you can avoid wasting resources on features that your customers don’t need and instead focus on the ones they do.
- Increased productivity. Developers who don’t use CI/CD are frequently under stress because of recurring bad deployments and difficult-to-fix outages. Because long-lived feature branches are too large to receive a proper review, code quality suffers. CI/CD, on the other hand, helps product managers optimize for user impact. Code is deployed while it is still fresh, which leads to h the development of better products.
- Reduced costs and easier maintenance. DevOps teams can maintain and update applications more easily. Automation eliminates the need for manual requests or unnecessary back-and-forth between developers and operations teams, as well as streamlines testing and decreases the number of errors that can occur in many of the recurring processes of the SDLC. The CI/CD pipeline helps companies save costs by updating small batches of code instead of larger software releases, allowing for more scalable and sustainable updates.
Of course, the CI/CD approach has its price: your projects must be developed this way to ensure rapid delivery.
This means your code repository (or repositories) must be managed using Git branches and active merges, so that each new feature is first developed and tested in an isolated branch, then integrated into broader branches like “stage,” and so on, and only then merged into the “main” release branch.
Continuous Integration & Continuous Delivery Stages
A CI/CD pipeline is a specification of the procedures that any software developer must follow to provide a new version of a product. Developers would still have to complete these stages manually if there were no automated pipeline, which would be significantly less productive.
Most software releases go through a couple of typical stages:
Failure in each stage usually triggers a notification to the responsible developers. Otherwise, the whole team receives a notification after each successful deployment to production.
Source Stage
A pipeline run is usually triggered by a source code repository. When the code is changed, the CI/CD tool receives a notification and runs the corresponding pipeline. Other frequent triggers include workflows that are automatically scheduled or initiated by the user, as well as the results of other pipelines.
Build Stage
The source code is combined with its dependencies to create a functional version of the product that may be potentially delivered to users. The compilation is required for software written in languages like Java, C/C++, or Go, whereas Ruby, Python, and JavaScript do not require this step.
Cloud-native software is generally deployed with Docker; this stage of the CI/CD pipeline creates Docker containers.
Failure to pass the build stage signals a major problem with a project’s configuration, which should be addressed as soon as possible.
Test Stage
During this stage, the team conducts automated tests to ensure that the code is correct and the product performs as expected. The test stage serves as a safety net, preventing end-users from being exposed to bugs.
It is the developers’ obligation to write tests. Writing new code in test- or behavior-driven development is the best way to write automated tests.
This phase can take anywhere from seconds to hours, depending on the project’s size and complexity. Many large-scale projects have numerous levels of testing, ranging from smoke tests to end-to-end integration tests that evaluate the entire system from the user’s perspective. To reduce execution time, a large test suite is usually parallelized.
The test stage helps to reveal bugs that the developers were unaware of when the code was written. It’s critical at this point to provide developers with feedback as soon as possible, while the issue is still fresh, so it will be easier to fix it.
Deploy Stage
This is the final stage of the process, during which the product is made publicly available. The build is ready to deploy to a live server once it has completed all of the relevant test cases.
How CI/CD Pipelines Help Development Teams
Imagine having to coordinate teams every time you need to run a test suite or set up the infrastructure for the next environment. This would result in fewer iterations and longer source and build stages.
The CI/CD pipeline is the pathway for getting the code into production. Software development is an iterative process, and developers can run automated CI/CD pipelines without the need for human interaction.
One of the main goals of DevOps teams is to foster the learnability and usability of pipelines. Certain environment-driven pipelines may let developers run all the way through pre-production while requiring another pipeline to reach production environments.
This would require a lot of iteration until the development team is satisfied with the pipeline. Fully automated CI/CD pipelines would go one step further and automate the process all the way to production.
Supporting Tools That Integrate with CI/CD Pipelines
A CI/CD pipeline is not just a set of abstract practices. It is supported by an expansive suite of tools that automate, orchestrate, and monitor each step of the process.
Source Code Management and Collaboration
Version control tools store and manage the project’s source code. They allow multiple developers to work on the same project without overwriting each other’s changes.
When someone commits or merges code, the pipeline can automatically start. Repository platforms also provide code review features, helping teams maintain quality and collaborate more effectively.
CI/CD Orchestration Tools
CI/CD orchestration tools manage the pipeline itself. They define what happens after code is changed, for example, creating the application, running tests, and deploying it.
These tools automate the sequence of steps and show logs and reports so developers can see whether everything worked correctly.
Build and Dependency Management Tools
Build tools prepare the application so it can run or be deployed. They compile code (if required), download necessary libraries, and package everything into a usable format.
Dependency management guarantees the application always uses the correct versions of external libraries, which helps avoid compatibility problems and makes builds invariant.
Testing Frameworks and Automation Tools
Testing tools automatically check whether the application works as expected. They can test small parts of the code (unit tests), how different parts work together (integration tests), and even how the entire system behaves from a user’s perspective.
If desired, other tests can be added to the automated pipeline; most often, these are regression tests. However, in rare cases, other types of tests, such as load and performance tests, can be added. Because these tests are time-consuming, they are processed independently, but not for every commit (i.e., daily).
Automated tests run every time the pipeline is triggered, helping detect problems before they reach production.
Containerization and Orchestration Tools
Container tools package applications together with everything they need to run. Orchestration tools manage multiple containers, helping with scaling, availability, and system reliability.
The most widely used are Docker, Docker-compose, and Kubernetes. However, depending on the requirements and cloud environment, cluster-specific services and tools may be required.
Infrastructure as Code (IaC) Tools
Infrastructure as Code tools allow teams to set up servers, databases, and networks using configuration files instead of manual setup. Besides, it enables infrastructure changes to be automated as part of the CI/CD pipeline, improving consistency across environments.
Typical examples are Terraform and Ansible; however, cloud solutions such as AWS CloudFormation can also be used.
Deployment and Release Automation Tools
Deployment tools manage the process of releasing the application to users. They help roll out updates safely and, if necessary, quickly return to a previous version.
Depending on the development stack, microservices architecture, and cloud platform used, the approach may vary.
In the simplest case, these are virtual machines that launch new software instances, then reroute traffic and terminate old versions. In more complex cases, this may involve AWS-specific automatic scaling using tunnels, mesh networks over Kubernetes, specialized database migration procedures, and so on.
Monitoring, Logging, and Feedback Tools
After deployment, monitoring and logging tools track how the application performs. They collect data about errors, system load, and user activity. If something goes wrong, they immediately alert the team.
In practice, this could be Grafana, Prometheus, and the InfluxDB family, or an ELK-based system, or something more specialized, such as CloudWatch in AWS. But in all cases, it means having logs, a way to search them, real-time metrics, and a dashboard for managing metrics and alerts.
Best Practices for Implementing CI/CD Pipelines
The main goal of setting up a CI/CD pipeline is to create simple, clear processes that help your team quickly and safely deliver software. These best practices can help you get better results.
- Commit Code Often: Developers should add and merge small code changes frequently instead of waiting too long. Smaller updates are easier to test, review, and fix if something goes wrong. This also reduces conflicts between team members.
- Keep the Pipeline Fast: The pipeline should run quickly. If builds and tests take too long, developers may avoid committing often. You can speed things up by running tests in parallel and removing unnecessary steps. Fast feedback helps fix problems immediately.
- Automate Testing: Testing should happen automatically every time code changes. Start with simple unit tests that check small pieces of code. Then add integration or end-to-end tests to make sure everything works together.
- Store Everything in Version Control: All code, configuration files, and even infrastructure settings should be saved in a version control system. This makes it easy to track changes, collaborate, and return to an earlier version if needed.
- Automate Infrastructure Setup: Instead of manually setting up servers and environments, use configuration files to create them automatically. This ensures that development, testing, and production environments are consistent and reduces setup mistakes.
- Add Security Checks Early: Security should not be an afterthought. Include automated security scans and dependency checks in your pipeline. Finding security flaws early makes them easier and cheaper to fix.
- Monitor and Improve: After setting up your pipeline, keep improving it. Check how long it takes to run, how often it fails, and where delays happen. Small improvements over time can make a big difference.
- Start Simple: If your team is new to CI/CD, begin with basic automation such as automatic builds and tests. When that works as intended, you can add automated deployments and more advanced features.
CI/CD with SCAND
SCAND uses CI/CD practices to help clients develop and release software faster and more safely. By automating building, testing, and deploying applications, we reduce the amount of manual work and lower the risk of mistakes.
When code is updated, our automated pipelines immediately check the changes, run tests, and prepare the application for release. This allows us to detect and fix problems early and deliver regular updates with minimal downtime and stable performance.
We also automate environment setup and deployment processes to keep development, testing, and production environments uniform. This makes projects easier to manage, scale, and maintain over time.
Security checks and monitoring are built directly into our pipelines. We continually monitor application performance after deployment, which helps us quickly respond to any issues and guarantee trustworthy operation.
Conclusion
The majority of monolithic approaches to software development are no longer effective in up-to-date, ever-changing requirements and user expectations. Businesses have to quickly react to user feedback and adjust the development process accordingly. That’s where quick iterative practices can come into place – continuous integration (CI), continuous delivery (CD), and continuous deployment(CD).
CI and CD provide more agility by decreasing software development and delivery timeframes from months to weeks or even days. This enables companies to produce better software more efficiently and within a shorter time frame.
The SCAND DevOps team is using CI/CD principles to offer seamless system development and updates with zero downtime. If you need assistance with implementing CI/CD principles into your development process, feel free to contact us.
