What is CI/CD?
CI/CD, which stands for continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD), creates a faster and more precise way of combining the work of different people into one cohesive product. In application development and operations (DevOps), CI/CD streamlines application coding, testing and deployment by giving teams a single repository for storing work and automation tools to consistently combine and test the code to ensure it works.
What is the CI/CD pipeline?
The continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline is an agile DevOps workflow focused on a frequent and reliable software delivery process. The methodology is iterative, rather than linear, which allows DevOps teams to write code, integrate it, run tests, deliver releases and deploy changes to the software collaboratively and in real-time.
A key characteristic of the CI/CD pipeline is the use of automation to ensure code quality. As the software changes progress through the pipeline, test automation is used to identify dependencies and other issues earlier, push code changes to different environments and deliver applications to production environments. Here, the automation’s job is to perform quality control, assessing everything from performance to API usage and security. This ensures the changes made by all team members are integrated comprehensively and perform as intended.
The ability to automate various phases of the CI/CD pipeline helps development teams improve quality, work faster and improve other DevOps metrics.
