Getting Started with CI/CD: What You Need to Know Before You Begin

This is a guest post, written by Riccardo Pons and Sandra Salerno, from the startup R2Devops!

In recent years, CI/CD has made a place for itself in companies. At the heart of DevOps methodologies, Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment have become a must-have in development processes.

Never heard of it before? Then this article is made for you!

DevOps and CI/CD, useful tools in companies

In the beginning, there was DevOps.

To put it simply, DevOps is the union of people, processes, and technologies!

Its primary goal is to break down the silos between Devs and Ops working on the same project, by giving them a common objective: producing value for the end customer.

Within DevOps, we find CI/CD: Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment.

CI/CD encompasses a set of practices that allow you to continuously integrate, deliver, and deploy your code.

It is used to automate various time-consuming but essential tasks for any good developer: code testing, documentation generation, deployment to your Cloud Provider…

Focus on CI and CD

CI/CD encompasses several stages found in the DevOps diagram:

CI oversees the build, testing, and delivery stages, while CD handles deployment and going into production.

Let's go a little further into detail and let me show you what Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Deployment (CD) are.

What is Continuous Integration (CI) used for?

Continuous Integration is a practice that, as its name suggests, allows for the continuous integration of changes made to a project's source code in order to detect and immediately correct any potential errors.

Developing software is often tedious, especially when working with others. Continuous Integration aims to make the software development of all projects easier. It comes into play notably when merging new features and bug fixes into the existing code.

Its main objective is to test new integrations by running an automated build, in order to detect errors as early as possible. It thus prevents developers from being blocked because of an error made several months earlier.

Indeed, it is more difficult to work on old code when you haven't had your hands in it for a while.

Why implement Continuous Deployment (CD)?

Continuous Deployment is a practice that aims to continuously deploy the latest changes made to the project's code so that they are directly accessible to the end customer. It comes as a continuation of Continuous Integration!

The main objective of Continuous Deployment is to be able to quickly bring real added value to the customer. It also improves the feedback loop, which is essential to properly understand their expectations and needs.

This deployment method allows for considerable gains in terms of software quality, project timelines, results, and development costs.

Combining CI and CD for greater efficiency

For each new integration, the code is automatically tested and goes through a certain number of stages. If all the stages succeed, the code is automatically deployed and made accessible to the various users.

If this is not the case, the developers are immediately notified and can identify and fix the problems more quickly!

The benefits of CI/CD

If the previous explanations haven't managed to convince you, let me tell you about the benefits of CI/CD.

Early error detection

As mentioned earlier, CI/CD allows errors to be detected much faster and more efficiently than traditional methods. Each integration is checked when it is pushed to the main branch. Errors are therefore spotted more quickly and thus fixed faster.

This helps maintain good code quality with checks via linters and also helps avoid side effects by running the static and dynamic tests defined in the project on every commit.

More frequent feedback

Automatically deploying verified code allows users to give feedback on the project more frequently, thus allowing developers to adjust their product more quickly to meet customer expectations.

The benefit is not only for the customer, since the developer saves a tremendous amount of time (and therefore money) by adapting more regularly to requests.

No cascading problems

Another benefit of CI/CD that stems from early error detection is being able to avoid the cascading multiplication of problems. Indeed, a minor error in one place can have larger repercussions elsewhere, and so on.

Detecting errors as early as possible thanks to Continuous Integration helps address this dread that haunts developers.

Precise record of changes

CI/CD also allows for a precise record of changes made to the code. This makes it possible to have a history that allows you to more quickly find the different versions of the code.

This can be handy for fixing a bug, or tracking down the source of a problem.

Continuous availability

Thanks to Continuous Deployment, the latest version is always available to the customer. They can directly see the changes and notice the improvements.

They are therefore at the heart of development, which improves their engagement and sense of ownership of the project.

Conclusion

CI/CD is now essential in order to adopt good development practices.

It is an advantage not only for developers, but also for customers. The only downside is that it is difficult to learn CI/CD on your own, and building your first pipeline can seem complicated.

Fortunately, an open source Discord community focused on CI/CD is able to help you and answer your questions. Don't hesitate any longer, and join the community that will know how to help you!