Introduction to CI/CD in DevOps
Traditionally, CI/CD existed before the concept of DevOps, but now it has become an essential part of DevOps. DevOps has seven stages: Plan, Code, Build, Test, Deploy, Operate, and Monitor. CI/CD plays a significant role within the Build, Test, and deploy stages, highlighting its importance in the DevOps lifecycle.
Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) improves product quality by reducing manual effort, speeding up software delivery, and improving overall product quality by automating the critical phases of building, testing, and deploying.
In this blog, we will explore how the CI/CD pipeline fits into the DevOps lifecycle
Understanding the CI/CD Pipeline
CI/CD pipeline is a key practice within the DevOps framework. A CI/CD pipeline is an automated process that stimulates software build, test, and deployment. CI is where developers push the code in the central codebase, and an automated process is triggered to build and test the code. The CD automatically deploys the application to environments. From this pipeline, teams are aiming to speed up the development and give quality products to their users.
CI/CD pipelines streamline the process of building and testing, fixing bugs, and deploying. This reduces the risk of errors as the entire process is automated, and minimal manual intervention is required. This gives more productivity to developers. They can improve the applications, make changes, or build new features. Rather than wasting time fixing the bugs in the previous application.
To learn more about the CI/CD process, check out our complete guide on CI/CD Pipelines.
3 Key Differences Between CI/CD and DevOps
Although CI/CD is a part of DevOps, there are still some key differences in terms of their scope, the stages included in each process, and the actual process itself. It is important to have a clear understanding because DevOps is a cultural philosophy that acts as a bridge between the developer and operational teams, whereas CI/CD is part of DevOps.
Benefits of CI/CD pipeline in DevOps.
Implementing a CI/CD pipeline can have several benefits on enhancing the existing DevOps workflows within organizations. Let’s understand some of the key benefits of CI/CD pipelines:
- Enhanced Developer Velocity: CI/CD pipelines automate testing and deployment processes, allowing teams to quickly test and release their applications to production. This accelerates development cycles and helps organizations stay competitive.
- Quick rollback: When a CI/CD pipeline is implemented properly, it has the ability to quickly roll back to a previous deployment version. This proves to be extremely useful when a deployment has issues or bugs.
- Continuous feedback: Thanks to automated testing pipelines, developers can get feedback on errors, insecure or buggy code quickly, and they can fix it before the applications get deployed to any environments.
- Improved Application Performance: Within the CI/CD pipeline, developers and DevOps teams can integrate multiple custom tools to run a variety of tests, such as security scans, functionality tests, load testing, etc. This ensures that the application will perform seamlessly under any conditions.
- Improved Dependency Management: The CI/CD pipeline can be configured to analyze the dependencies of the application and automatically download the required dependencies. This ensures that the application does not face errors due to missing dependencies.
CI/CD Tools in DevOps
- Devtron: Devtron streamlines the CI/CD pipeline with built-in GitOps support and seamless integration with tools like Argo CD. It automates the entire deployment process on Kubernetes, ensuring reliability, consistency, and reduced operational effort across environments.
- Jenkins: Jenkins is an automation server that specializes in CI/CD, requiring you to write custom scripts to build the pipeline and automate tasks. It works on cloud platforms, so you first need to provision the required infrastructure and self-manage the Jenkins instance. Learn how Jenkins automates CI/CD.
- GitLab: GitLab is an integrated DevOps platform that offers version control, CI/CD, issue tracking, and code review. In GitLab, runners are the agents that execute your job in the CI/CD pipeline. Understand how GitLab simplifies CI/CD with native workflows.
- GitHub Actions: GitHub Actions is a GitHub-native tool for the CI/CD pipeline. The benefit of using GitHub Actions is that developers do not need to use another tool to build their CI/CD pipelines. Additionally, Actions has pre-made templates that you can select from or create and run custom actions. Discover how GitHub Actions built-in DevOps features.
Conclusion
CI/CD pipelines automate the entire application delivery process from creating a programme to deploy in environments or improving the existing one. No matter the type of software you're developing, CI/CD can automate the complete process. It applies to all kinds of projects. Tools like GitLab, Jenkins, and GitHub Actions make it easy to set up CI/CD, helping teams work faster, reduce errors, and quickly adjust to any changes in the development process.
FAQ
What is the difference between DevOps and CI CD pipeline?
DevOps covers a broad range of practices aimed at improving collaboration between development and operations teams. It includes everything from managing infrastructure to monitoring applications, ensuring smooth operations throughout the entire software development lifecycle. In this approach, the goal is to create effective environments for development, testing, and operation. On the other hand, CI/CD specifically focuses on the pipeline for building, testing, and deploying software efficiently.
What is a CI/CD pipeline?
A CI/CD pipeline is a series of steps that automatically test and deploy code whenever changes are made, helping to ensure that everything works well before it goes live.
What are CI/CD tools?
CI/CD tools are software that help automate the processes of building, testing, and deploying code, making it easier for developers to release updates quickly and reliably. Examples include Devtron, GitLab CI, Jenkins, and CircleCI.
Is GitHub a CI/CD pipeline?
GitHub itself is primarily a version control platform, but it offers GitHub Actions, which you can use to set up CI/CD pipelines within your GitHub projects.
