Meeting your organization's competitive demands means that you need to deliver software development with both speed and reliability. Your business now needs to be able to develop with both speed and reliability in order for you to differentiate yourself in the market. New features have to be delivered quickly but they also need to have systems that are secure and reliable. Organizations can discover huge improvements in their digital products through the transformation of organizations with use of CI/CD, by automating the software delivery process, identifying and eliminating manual errors from the software delivery pipeline and delivering a high-quality product to the market at a faster pace.
If your organization intends to expand its digital offering through the software development life cycle, then a CI/CD strategy will provide you and your organization with the necessary tools to develop an efficient and agile software development environment.
Continuous Integration (CI) enables developers to merge their code into a single repository automatically as soon as they check it in. The build and test processes will automatically run after checking in code to ensure that any integration error can be identified as early as possible in the development process.
Continuous Delivery (CD) is the next step beyond CI, which will automatically prepare the validated code for use in production environments. Continuous Deployment (CD) takes it a step further; when a change passes the appropriate quality checks and tests, it will automatically deploy any changes to production environments.
Thus, CI and CD together will create a seamless process for moving software from development to production environments with a very high level of reliability and consistency.
Software deployment in a traditional format is often a long and tedious event filled with multiple manual steps and a host of issues as a result of that manual effort. However, with CI/CD, these repetitive tasks are now automated and standardized in the complete software development lifecycle.
Business Benefits of Using CI/CD are:
· Faster Time to Market – CI/CD Pipelines allow for teams to get functional updates delivered to customers quicker and more frequently.
· Improved Quality of Software – With CI/CD, you can use Automated Testing to detect defects sooner in the Development Cycle only to get customers updated sooner than later.
· Decrease in the Risk associated with Deployment – By using smaller incremental updates, you decrease the potential for larger issues occurring during a release.
· Higher Developer Productivity – Most of a developer's focus will be developing new code for features that are going to be delivered to customers instead of focusing on code already deployed in Production.
· Greater Team Cohesiveness and Collaboration – Due to the open and collaborative nature of CI/CD all departments working together will benefit from stronger relationships among team members and an enhanced ability to work as one unified body.
Main components of CI/CD Pipeline:
A suitable CI/CD Pipeline comprises several stages of the software delivery lifecycle that are automated for the software delivery cycle.
1. Source Control Management:
The initial stage of the pipeline is utilizing a version-control system like Git to hold all changes made to the source code; as soon as a developer commits a change the CI/CD AI would automatically initiate an automated workflow to trigger build/test processes.
2. Build Automation:
Through continuous integration (CI), the application will be built; as a part of the build automation process, the CI system will compile the application to prepare the build artifacts; this would ensure that the application has been packaged correctly and will be ready to be tested.
3. Automated Testing:
Automated testing is one of the most important aspects of CI/CD pipelines. By performing automated unit tests and automated integration tests, and producingautomated results of security validation during this stage allows for a valid code base quality assurance and reliability to exist, so that the code base can continue to the next CI/CD process.
4. Continuous Integration Verification:
This step is comprised of the CI system validating that the new integrated code works properly with existing components or systems. If there are any errors during this stage, they will be communicated back to the developer so that the developer can fix the issue in a timely manner.
5. Deployment Automation:
After completing the Build requirements and passing all Test requirements, the CI/CD Pipeline will then automatically deploy the completed application.
A CI/CD pipeline workflow will have greatly improved availability and reliability when deployed within a cloud environment or containers. CI services from Cloud Providers allow a customer to scale their entire CI/CD workflow dynamically to meet demand in an unbroken, fault-tolerant manner.
Today’s cloud or hybrid CI/CD environments typically support coordination of Containers (using orchestration tools) and Infrastructure as Code (IaC) solutions to allow teams to easily perform complicated application deployments.
Using these tools, companies can guarantee application performance levels, movement between, and the scaling of applications in multiple environments.
Add Security in a CI/CD Process
Security Should Be Considered as Part of a CI/CD Process From The Very Beginning (DevSecOps) That’s Why DevSecOps Will Embed Security Testing Into The Whole CI/CD Pipeline.
Some Of The Most Common Security Best Practices Include:
· Automated Vulnerabilities Scanning
· Secure Code Analysis
· Library/Dependency Checking
· Infrastructure Security Validation
· Compliance Monitoring
Incorporating Security Inside CI/CD Pipelines Will Provide Organizations With Less Risk From Vulnerabilities Entering Production.
Best Practices For CI/CD
To successfully implement a CI/CD process within an organization, there are many different practices that should be adopted as the best way to achieve success. Some of the most important have been identified as the following:
1) Create one single source of truth for all code repositories.
2) Use automated testing through the whole development lifecycle.
3) Use small incremental code changes to reduce risks associated with the deployment of new code.
4) Implement monitoring and rollback features for rapid recovery from failed deployments.
5) Encourage collaboration between Dev, Ops & Security teams.
Following these best-practices will help organizations to create an efficient, reliable and scalable CI/CD pipeline.
Creating Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI-CD) Pipelines is essential for transforming the way that companies develop their software today, (i.e., moving away from traditional software development), in order to manage end-to-end integration & testing as part of one complete Automated Implementation Process (AIP) – i.e., Including Deployment. This enables an organization to deliver Higher Quality Software to their customers quicker…and with Improved Reliability & Security associated with the software products they build.
Today’s organizations are going through extremely fast digital transformations. Implementing a CI-CD Operating Platform will elevate how organizations can innovate, scale their products/services, & continue to improve in this constantly evolving technological world. CI-CD assures all organizations a function in this new fast-paced world.