DevOps is becoming popular among the software community and industry. There are several factors contributing to the rising demand for DevOps such as agility, reduced costs, and fast application delivery. According to a report, the DevOps market will be worth $10.31 Billion by 2023.

You might be wondering why we are discussing this. This is because, within DevOps, the CICD pipeline is the mainstream among software companies. The CI/CD process is more similar to a software development lifecycle.

Understanding the nitty-gritty of the CI/CD pipeline is important to keep your business on par with other software companies or even stay ahead of them.

So, we are going to discuss everything you need to know about the CD/CD pipeline including what it is exactly and how it can benefit your organization. But before that, let’s breakdown the terms CD and CD and what they mean.

What Is CI?

CI stands for Continuous Integration. The term was originally coined by ThoughtWorks. Here is what they define CI as:

CI a development practice that needs developers to integrate code into a shared repository several times a day. Each check-in is then verified by an automated build, allowing teams to detect problems early.

There are several benefits of CI such as:

● Zero long integrations

● Allows developers to spend less time debugging and more time building features

● Developers don’t have to spend time waiting if the code is going to work.

● Reduce integration problems allowing you to deliver software more rapidly

● Helps identify issues early and fix them immediately

● Increase visibility enabling greater communication

What is CD?

CD stands for Continuous Deployment. Again this term was originally coined by ThoughtWorks.

It resembles with continuous delivery but is a step further towards process automation. The change that passes through all the production stages is released to the client directly without requiring any human intervention. There is no need for performing the deployment manually for each release.

You have now understood what CI and CD are and now let’s understand what the CI/CD pipeline is.

What Is the CI/CD Pipeline?

Simply put, it is a process pathway through which you can deliver a single unit of production-ready software. Developers can select which services they’ll use to build this; there’s no single canonical implementation of a CI/CD pipeline.

Why Should You Care About CI/CD Pipeline?

There are many reasons why you should care about it such as:

Improves Code Quality

CI/CD enhances the code quality. The pipeline allows you to integrate codes into a common repository in small batches. Through this repository, you can share builds with your team and don’t have work in isolation.

This means the whole team can collaborate together for debugging. Developers will get quick feedback on whether the new code works and whether any bugs were found. This helps share stable build in frequent intervals and makes sure poor or bad codes do not go into production.

Ensures Faster MTTR

MTTR stands for “Mean Time to Resolution”. It helps monitor the amount of time spend to recover from a failure.

CI/CD pipeline cuts down MTTR because developers need to make smaller code changes and can detect faults quickly.

Improves Productivity

Automation in the CI/CD pipeline diminishes the number of errors that may come up in the repetitive steps of CI and CD. This frees up developer time which they could spend on product development because there won’t be many code changes to fix if the errors are detected early. All this translates into improved productivity.

Increases Release Rate

Because the errors can be detected faster and so as repairing the errors, the release rates increase. However, you can only make frequent releases if you develop the codes in a continuous moving system.

CI/CD keep merging the codes and constantly deploys them to production after thorough testing, keeping the code in a release-ready state.

You must set up a production environment as part of a deployment that closely mimics that which end-users will ultimately be using.

Containerization will helps your developers test the code in a production environment to test only the area that will be affected by the release.

Do you’ve any questions about CI/CD Pipeline?