Path to Success with CICD Pipeline Delivery

Abstract

Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment is two very important practices in DevOps. Continuous Integration (CI) is a key player during Agile Development and DevOps processes. Here, Dedicated User stories is assigned, and respective builds developed by different developers (under a regular development environment) and tasks of other teams are delivered commonly to a team build server. All the individual work is then integrated in a common build area to form an integration single build. The process then moves across higher environment build server and then applied system-wide or application-wide i.e. in Production Environment. This way the continuous integrations are done, and builds happen, making the Continuous Integration pipeline implemented. Continuous Integration (CI) is considered as a key practice in SDLC (Software Development Life Cycle’s), where software changes (CRs/user stories/tasks) are implemented in isolation, tested immediately and reported when they are added to a larger code base. The objective of CI is to ensure timely detection of errors/bugs/defects reported during the product lifecycle, address them and provide feedback to correct the same. Thus, DevOps lifts deployment more frequently and provides more opportunities to re-assess the delivery process, via automation, effective testing and monitoring strategy. DevOps CICD practices provide valuable data for CI (Continuous Improvement) around monitoring and metrics. Ideally CI must be a part of every DevOps process, irrespective of organizational scale or size, and should certainly be driven by a solid Quality Assurance (QA) strategy. Moving on to Continuous Delivery (CD), DevOps relation with the CD pipeline spins around the new features that developers work with and those released to customers, in a timely manner. All the builds that pass-through QA need not go into production. Only those with functional stability can be moved to production environment and will then become ‘production-ready’ before staging. This Best practice of regular delivery of applications (under development environment) to QA and Operations for validation, and potential release to clients is known as a Continuous Delivery (CD).