Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment

What is it?

Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Deployment (CD) are a set of operating principles and practices that enable application development teams to deliver code changes more frequently and reliably.

• Continuous Integration is the practice of automating the integration of code changes from multiple contributors into a single software project. It involves automatically building and testing the code every time a team member commits changes to version control.
• Continuous Deployment extends this by automatically deploying all code changes to a testing or production environment after the build stage.

Why is it Important?

• Velocity: Removes manual gatekeepers, allowing features to reach users in minutes rather than weeks.
• Quality: Automated testing catches regressions immediately, preventing “integration hell” at the end of a release cycle.
• Reliability: Automated pipelines function deterministically, eliminating the “it works on my machine” syndrome and reducing manual deployment errors.

Well-known Solutions

• CI/CD Platforms: GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, CircleCI, Jenkins.
• Continuous Delivery: Spinnaker, ArgoCD (GitOps).
• Infrastructure: Kubernetes, Docker.