Have you been hearing a lot about CI/CD pipeline of late? Are you curious about what it is and what are the uses of CI CD pipeline? Would you prefer your engineering team to produce high-quality code quickly and without errors? Seriously, who wouldn’t? To do that sustainably over time, you need a quick and trustworthy CI/CD pipeline.

What Does CI/CD Mean?

Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery (CD), also known as CI/CD, are methods for more quickly and precisely fusing the labor of various individuals into a single, cohesive result. By providing teams with a Unified repository to store their assets in and automation tools to constantly combine and test the code to ensure its functionality, CI/CD optimizes application development and operations (DevOps) by streamlining application coding, testing, and deployment.

So what, then, is the CI/CD pipeline?

To release a new version of software, a continuous integration and continuous deployment pipeline is necessary. CI/CD pipelines seek to improve software delivery throughout the whole software development life cycle through automation. Software development is guided along a route of building, testing, and deploying code via a process known as CI/CD pipeline.

Benefits of CI/CD Pipeline 

Below listed are some of the main benefits of CI/CD pipeline.

• Automated testing makes production-ready code more profitable and ensures the security and quality of software, enabling continuous delivery.

• Testing is made simpler and more productive with smaller iterations. It is more straightforward to identify and correct issues because each new iteration’s code is smaller and has a smaller testing area. Less valuable features can be easily altered or even abandoned before more development is lost. Features can be more easily evaluated for usefulness and user acceptance.

• New product features may be released much more quickly with the aid of CI/CD pipelines, benefiting customers and reducing the effort for developers.

• The significant boost in delivery speed that CI/CD pipelines provide increases an organization’s competitive advantage.

Elements of CI/CD Pipeline

Continuous integration, delivery, and deployment are combined into the CI/CD pipeline’s four main stages: source, build, test, and deploy. Each step makes use of precise standards, tools, and automation.10

Source Stage

This is the pipeline’s first stage. When a developer modifies a codebase, it is started or triggered. This typically happens when a developer uses the git push or git merge command to add source code to a version control system’s code repository.

Build Stage

The majority of the compilation occurs during the build stage. This entails packaging the project’s source code and its dependencies into self-contained units in microservice-based container platforms like Docker and Containerd. The software program is then created by compiling these to create a runnable instance. It should be highlighted that steps like compilation are essential for languages such as Java and C++. However, the compilation is skipped for interpreted languages like Python and JavaScript. Software artifacts that fail to pass this test have fundamental, underlying issues, such as improper architectural setup.

Test and Secure Stage

Shift Left Testing is another name for this stage. The “shift left” testing movement aims to move testing closer to the beginning of the software development process. A project can decrease the number of bugs and improve the quality of the code by testing frequently and early. The objective is to avoid discovering any significant bugs that call for code patching during the deployment phase and produce high quality code. The team will benefit from a CI/CD pipeline’s built-in automation by saving time and effort. Automated tests, such as smoke tests, unit tests, and integration tests, are conducted to assess the application’s accuracy and logic. Once the code has been tested, the following step is to scan and secure it.

Deploy Stage

Once the application is tested and scanned for vulnerabilities, it is released into a test or staging environment for further UAT tests. For a variety of reasons, organizations frequently maintain multiple staging environments. Alpha environments, for example, are used for user-acceptance testing to find flaws in the program before making it available to product users. Beta is a restricted release for a small number of chosen users, and the public can use the production environment. The deployment stage illustrates the requirement to maintain an adequate degree of quality assurance.

How the CI/CD Pipeline Works

The delivery of your software is automated through a CI/CD pipeline. Code is written, tests are run (CI), and an updated application is safely released via the pipeline (CD). Automated pipelines remove human error, provide consistent feedback loops to engineers, and speed up product cycles.

Automating the procedure aims to reduce human error and keep the software release process consistent. The pipeline may contain tools for code compilation, unit testing, code analysis, security, and binaries production. This pipeline would also entail packaging the code as a container image for deployment across a hybrid cloud in containerized settings.

CI/CD is more of a mindset than merely a workflow or methodology. It’s producing competent engineers who naturally possess this way of thinking as CI/CD encompasses more than just the procedures.

The goal of Ozone is to simplify DevOps teams and eliminate any complexity. Deploying containerized and decentralized applications across multiple blockchain networks and hybrid clouds is made easier and more automated. Ozone seamlessly integrates with popular tools in CI, CD, analytics, security, and automation to support your software delivery from start to finish in even the most complex scenarios.