What the hack are CI/CD pipelines?

OK. First of all, you need to understand some fancy terms to know in order to understand properly what CI/CD pipelines are.

Good to know: CI/CD stands for Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery/Deployment which are practices used in software development to automate and streamline the process of building, testing, and deploying applications.

Continuous Integration (CI)

Developers frequently push code to a shared repository (like GitHub or GitLab).Every time new code is added (through a commit or pull request), the CI pipeline runs automatically.

It usually:
- Builds the application (compiling the code).
- Runs tests to ensure the new code doesn’t break existing features.

If the build or tests fail, developers are notified, and they can fix the problem quickly.

So, to sum up the goal of Continuous Integration (CI) is
automate the process of integrating code changes into a shared codebase.

Real-life example:
Let’s say you’re working on a website. Every time you make a change and push it to the main repository, the CI pipeline will:

1. Automatically build your project (e.g., turn your code into an executable or deployable state).
2. Run a set of automated tests to check if your changes are working.
3. Report if something is broken so you can fix it immediately.

Continuous Delivery (CD)

Once the CI process finishes and the code is verified, the CD part of the pipeline ensures the code is ready to be deployed at any time.

Continuous Delivery means that the code is always in a deployable state, but human approval might be required to actually deploy it to production.

So, the goal of Continuous Delivery is to automate the deployment of applications to different environments (like staging, testing, and production).

Continuous Deployment (CD):

This takes Continuous Delivery a step further by automatically deploying every code change that passes tests directly to production without human intervention.

This is useful for fast-moving projects that need frequent updates, but it requires a very mature pipeline.

How Does a CI/CD Pipeline Look?

1. Developer commits code.
2. CI pipeline starts:
   • Builds the application.
   • Runs unit tests.
3. If successful, the CD pipeline starts:
   • Deploys to a staging or testing environment for further checks.
4. If everything looks good:
   • Either deploys to production automatically (Continuous Deployment) or waits for manual approval to deploy (Continuous Delivery).

Key Tools for CI/CD:

• Jenkins, GitLab CI, GitHub Actions, CircleCI – Automate the CI/CD process.
• Docker, Kubernetes – Often used for deploying applications in containers.

In summary, CI/CD helps developers work more efficiently by automating routine tasks like testing and deploying, so they can focus on writing code and delivering features faster.

Happy coding!