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CI/CD Summary
Summary
CI/CD stands for Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery/Deployment. It’s a development practice that automates building, testing, and delivering software so code changes can be released quickly and reliably.
Continuous Integration (CI)
CI means developers frequently merge their code into a shared repository. Every time code is pushed:
- The code is built automatically.
- Automated tests run.
- If something breaks, the team is alerted.
Goal: catch bugs early and ensure new code works with the rest of the project.
Continuous Delivery / Continuous Deployment (CD)
CD takes the tested code from CI and prepares it for release.
- Continuous Delivery: Code is automatically prepared for production, but a human approves the final deployment.
- Continuous Deployment: Code is automatically deployed to production with no manual approval.
Goal: make releases faster and safer.
Pipelines
A pipeline is the automated workflow that runs these steps in sequence. Think of it as a script that defines what happens after a code change.
Typical pipeline stages:
- Source – code pushed to repository
- Build – compile the application
- Test – run automated tests
- Package – create deployable artifact (e.g., Docker image)
- Deploy – release to staging or production
Example simplified pipeline:
Code Push → Build → Test → Package → Deploy
Why CI/CD is useful
- Faster development cycles
- Fewer integration bugs
- Automated testing and deployment
- More reliable releases
Common CI/CD tools
- GitHub Actions
- Jenkins
- GitLab CI/CD
- CircleCI
In short: CI/CD uses pipelines to automatically build, test, and deploy software whenever code changes are made.