A CTO’s Guide to Learn the Ins and Outs of CI/CD Pipelines

Quick Summary: CI/CD has emerged as a must-have technology for various organizations. However, knowing the right way to make the best use of it and how to boost the efficiency of the development procedure is crucial. This article seeks to offer a concise introduction to the CI/CD pipeline, its overarching merits, stages, tools, and best practices so that you can have a holistic understanding of this technology.

Delivering new code or modifying the existing one is pretty much the bread and butter of every software developer. With the advancement of technology, the release process has drastically changed over the last two decades and led to a whole new bunch of methodologies, workflows, and tools.

However, this progress comes with the very practical possibility of developers struggling to keep pace with it or being unfamiliar with an efficient way to work within their production environment.

The traditional release process is far more stressful and involves a great deal of manual work. Developers had to roll out updates when users were less likely to use the software, such as late at night. The overall procedure was painfully tedious, where the slightest human error would set back the deployment of a build.

CI/CD pipelines changed all of this. Lying at the heart of DevOps services, these practices help you roll back releases with the touch of a button or cut the release time down to just 5 minutes.

Developers' experience with CI/CD turned out to be a real wake-up moment for them as more and more tech giants started to embrace this approach. For example, Amazon deploys a new code every 11.7 seconds, and Netflix does the same hundred times a day; all credit goes to CI/CD.

To have a better understanding of Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery and how you can make the best use of it for your development workflow, you have to keep reading.

So, let’s start with defining these terms, as we need to make sure that we are all on the same page!

What is Continuous Integration?

The building, testing, and automatic merging of new code into a repository is the process of Continuous Integration, the CI in CI/CD. The automated tests will catch any potentially application-breaking code, allowing developers to frequently publish new code without worrying about it. With modern tools like Jenkins or CircleCI, the process of developing and testing code has become exceptionally simplified.

Instead of a human, an efficiently configured CI pipeline merges the code to the new branch without the scope of any manual error. However, developers can end up with some situations that automation just cannot handle.

What is Continuous Delivery?

Continuous Delivery is the next stage in the CI/CD pipeline. CD enables automatic releases of verified code changes made in the Continuous Integration phase into live production environments or code repositories. The software is tested to find potential bugs and fix them automatically. The DevOps gets notified of the new build during the last CD stage, and they push it onto the deployment stage.

The deployment of new code with the least amount of manual intervention is the ultimate goal of a CD pipeline. It also focuses on the software release strategy with little scope for human intervention, enabling developers to release products just through the click of a button.

Okay, What is Continuous Deployment, Then?

Since Continuous Deployment and Continuous Delivery are so similar and have the same acronym (CD), people tend to use them interchangeably. What really deploys the code is the main distinction between these two practices.

Continuous Deployment uses an automated workflow to build a workable version of every update before pushing it right away into production, as opposed to waiting for human approval to release a product. The code itself must pass a significant amount of testing before going into production because there is no holding for a manual approval cycle. The aim is to ensure high code integrity throughout all stages of the SDLC.

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Now, What is a CI/CD Pipeline?

Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery is a tried-and-tested DevOps technique that emphasizes regular and reliable software delivery. DevOps teams can build code, integrate it, run tests, deliver releases, and collaboratively provide software upgrades – all in real-time since the process uses iterative rather than a linear progression.

A crucial component of the DevOps CI-CD pipeline is the use of automated procedures to ensure superior code quality. Developers run unit testing to spot dependencies and similar issues, push revisions to various environments, and deliver software to production environments as software upgrades move through the pipeline.

Last but not least, the ability to automate different CI/CD pipeline steps helps development teams improve build quality, work more productively, and meet other software quality metrics and KPIs.

Why Should You Build CI/CD Pipelines?

If you have not set up a CI-CD framework in your development process, you are missing out on a lot of things. Here are some reasons that justify the importance of this DevOps process:

• It provides speedy system error/failure detection as well as resolution support to developers. An artifact is created and saved each time a test fails, which developers can use to learn useful information about the problem so they can start working on it to fix it.
• It promotes complete transparency within an organization. Generally speaking, CI/CD tools focus on rapidly getting the product out to users. It receives input from both internal team members and customers, enabling end-to-end communication between users and developers.
• The continuous feedback loop introduced by CI/CD empowers developers and test engineers to work together on bug fixes. For instance, initial tests would always fail in a Test-Driven Development (TDD). Here, the testing team and developers would collaborate to create test cases that genuinely support the TDD environment.
• CI/CD systems alert developers with a quick fix in case of a zero-day vulnerability (a device or system vulnerability that has been identified but not yet been patched), allowing them to skip the main security risk before even the security folks are informed.
• It speeds up the time to market, decreases the backlog for software releases, and increases test reliability. The development team can execute back-to-back deployments with high-quality code with fast release cycles and CI-CD automation.

Key Benefits of a Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery Pipeline

Even though the five reasons mentioned above are compelling enough for anyone to embrace this DevOps practice, let us take it further by noting down five proven advantages of using a CI/CD pipeline:

Precise Planning

Development teams can plan more accurately by incorporating the latest feedback and concentrating on the important issues due to the faster speed and improved visibility of CI and CD.

Quick Response

Continuous Integration paves the way for uninterrupted commits and tests. Due to shorter development cycles, developers and testers can easily discover bugs that can only be found during the runtime.

Time and Money Saving

A CI/CD system allows you to spend less time on time and resource-intensive manual tasks, such as infrastructure maintenance, testing, and launch. By finding errors in the early phases of the Software Development Life Cycle, it dramatically cuts down the overall development cost.

Frequent Releases

By dealing with frequently available deployment-ready code and smaller commits, CI/CD workflows empower developers to quickly deploy changes to the production environment or staging.

Competitive Advantage

CI and CD in DevOps allow developers to tinker with new technologies, implement new code integrations, and quickly respond to customer requirements, achieving a competitive edge for their business.

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Essential Stages of a CI/CD Pipeline Developers Should Know

In general, CI/CD pipelines may differ based on a range of variables, including the DevOps architecture, the type of the application, the configuration of the source code repository, and other important components of the software project.

Having said that, here are the tried-and-true phases that are relatively and frequently followed in Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment pipelines:

1. Source

Usually, a source code repository triggers the CI/CD pipeline. By running the pipeline, it then receives an alert or identifies a code change by itself and responds accordingly. You can also trigger the pipeline with automatically scheduled or user-initiated workflows as well as other pipelines.

2. Build

In this stage, the pipeline typically writes and compiles the source code. A new build is created after the compiler collects all of the code's components and their dependencies, creates links to the necessary modules and libraries. Any conflicts or errors in the new build are identified and resolved right away at this point.

3. Test

Teams conduct automated tests at this step of CI-CD development to validate the code's accuracy and guarantee its quality. Unit testing and functional testing are the starting points of automated testing to make sure that the new functionalities are operating as desired. It then moves on to regression and integration testing to ensure that the new upgrades work without affecting the features that are already stable.

4. Deliver

The codebase is delivered to a runtime environment for integration, quality control, and preproduction after it clears the testing phase. In continuous deployment, this is an automatic stage but only based on the developers’ approval in continuous delivery. Here, developers run performance and functional testing on the software application.

5. Deploy

At last, the deployment of the code modifications starts, and the entire product enters the production environment. At this CI/CD pipeline stage, developers use container orchestration tools like Kubernetes and Docker to streamline software deliveries to production environments. You can set up your pipeline to launch applications to all users, a specific group of users, or schedule code deployments. You can also design your pipeline to roll back releases if a problem occurs.

Best Practices for Building a CI/CD Pipeline

At this point of this article, you might have understood the gravity of Continuous Integration and Continuous Development. However, creating a CI/CD pipeline is not a five-finger exercise. It’s a rigorous process that demands complete DevOps transformation, including a myriad of decisive factors.

So, we confronted our senior DevOps experts for the best practices of Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery to help you kickstart your CI/CD pipeline journey. What did we come up with? Let’s explore:

• Utilize Tracking and Version Control Tools
  You can easily work with distributed teams using tools like Redmine or Jira and have better visibility into the development of your product. You must also use a version control system, like GitHub, which facilitates a "single source of truth" for your team, enables monitoring of all the changes in the codebase, and proves to be useful whenever a rollback is necessary. GitOps can drastically reduce your MTTR by facilitating team collaboration and change integration into the shared repository.
• Follow a “Security First” Approach
  Since you build a CI/CD system using continuous Integration workflows, it gives access to your codebase and credentials to deploy in different environments. Hence, it is frequently exposed to cybersecurity risks. As a result, you should isolate your CI-CD tools and store them on secure internal networks. You will benefit from using VPNs, MFA, identity and access management systems, and so on.
• Implement a Microservices Architecture
  A microservices architecture is an ideal strategy for DevOps integration in software development. Modernizing your current infrastructure is not a walk in the park, and, therefore, you must adopt a gradual approach and keep your critical systems running while implementing the new architecture on it. You can progressively replace the old system with the new architecture with the help of a microservices architecture.

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• Build Only Once
  You should avoid any methods that require creating source code several times. You should only carry out that build process only once and then promotes your binaries, even if you need to build, package, and bundle the software. This stage serves as the first step in the Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery cycle to package the software in a clean environment in the majority of successful CI pipeline implementations. This reduces the scope for oversights and cuts down the potential for errors.
• Reduce Branching, Commit Often
  Spending more time on development and less time on version control is the goal of reducing branching. To fully utilize GitOps, developers must merge changes from their local branches into the main branch or commit straight to it at least once each day. In contrast to the integration hassles and related rework that occurs when trying to merge numerous branches into the trunk right before release, this practice will force DevOps engineers to work with smaller, more manageable integration problems.

How to Create an Efficient CI/CD Pipeline?

The configuration of a CI/CD pipeline changes based on the unique requirements of the businesses. Therefore, creating a CI/CD pipeline is not strictly a rigid process. However, to build any CI-CD framework, organizations must adhere to a few basic yet fundamental steps, such as:

1. To maintain code repositories, pick a version control system first. You can select a hosting provider or a hosted version based on your business goals. These choices are provided by all of the main cloud service providers, including AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud.
2. Create source code repositories to deploy pipelines and application source code.
3. Decide which server, CI, or build you wish to use. You have the choice of using a self-hosted solution like Jenkins or an external solution like Azure DevOps CI-CD Pipelines, CircleCI, or GitHub CI/CD.
4. Configure a pipeline task to build the application code and its dependencies. In some implementations, a Docker image is created throughout this procedure.
5. Run fundamental tests on the code, such as style checks and static analysis, to make sure it adheres to code quality and coding standards.
6. Now you need to publish the build's artifact or container image to a store or registry.
7. Next, carry out additional tests on the build, such as user experience testing or sanity testing. Feel free to fail the phase if the code quality does not meet the requirements. It is recommended to publish the test and code coverage data for additional reviews and fixes in the next builds.
8. The build is ready to be deployed in production once the tests have verified it. Multiple staged environments could be a part of this.

Top CI/CD Pipeline Tools You Must Use

With the rise of successful DevOps roadmaps, a number of tools have come to the rescue to streamline the overall CI/CD pipeline and its core activities. However, with so many solutions in the market, it can be challenging for your organization to select the best-suited tools that help you meet your development mission and vision.

Thus, we have compiled a list of the most common CI-CD tools to make your decision-making process easier:

Build Tools

• Travis CI
• Buddy
• Codeship

Configuration Management Tools

• Chef
• Ansible
• Terraform

Source Code Management Tools

• GitHub
• GitLab
• BitBucket

Version Control Tools

• Git
• Apache Subversion
• Mercurial

Monitoring Tools

• Dynatrace
• Datadog
• Instana

Testing Tools

• Mocha
• Selenium
• Testsigma

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See a CI/CD Pipeline in Action with RadixwebIn order to maximize the outcomes of your work, we can conclude that Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment are the building blocks. For developers who would rather spend their time on innovative projects than tiresome manual activities, using a CI/CD pipeline is a viable solution. Additionally, CI-CD pipelines give developers the ability to speed up the development process, reduce testing time, and enhance user experience.Despite all that, transitioning to a CI/CD ecosystem can be a daunting task unless and until you have a reliable DevOps expert to back you up. And talking about a reliable DevOps expert, Radixweb got you covered. Our vetted DevOps engineers provide unparallel DevOps CI/CD services to help you deliver quality software at scale and speed by creating a resilient integration and delivery pipeline.So, reach out to us for a goal-oriented deployment of CI/CD pipelines and expand DevOps hues across your organization!