Learn what CI/CD is and the difference with DevOps

CI CD differs from DevOps? Very common in the daily lives of information technology professionals, CI/CD is a set of continuous integration and delivery practices for application development teams to deliver code changes more frequently and reliably.

It is a recommended action for developer and operations teams , and is also recommended for use in the agile methodology . By automating integration and delivery, members of software development groups will be able to focus on meeting business requirements, ensuring code quality and software security.

Most modern applications require code to be developed using a variety of platforms and tools, so teams need a consistent mechanism to integrate and validate changes.

DevOps, on the other hand, unites practices and functionalities built to shorten the systems development life cycle, and increase the ability of a given business to provide applications and services in a shorter time.

Understand more about what CI/CD is, what it is for, the difference between one and the other, its relationship with DevOps, benefits and more. Good reading!

What is CI/CD?

CI /CD is a method for frequently delivering software to customers by introducing automation into the application development stages. The main concepts assigned are continuous integration, continuous delivery and continuous deployment.

Continuous Integration (CI)

Continuous integration (CI) is a practice where developers make small changes and checks to a code. Due to the scale of requirements and the number of phases involved, this flow is automated to ensure that teams can reliably develop, test and finalize applications.

In summary, CI primarily helps simplify code changes, thereby increasing the time for developers to make changes and contribute to improving the software.

Continuous Delivery (CD)

Continuous delivery (CD) is the automated delivery of complete code to environments such as testing and development. Technically, it provides an automated way and works for code to be delivered to these environments.

Did you know that continuous deployment is the next step in continuous delivery? That’s right! Every change that passes automated testing is automatically pushed into production, resulting in many production deployments.

Continuous deployment should be the goal for most companies that are not limited by regulatory or other requirements.

What is CI/CD used for?

Understand that CI/CD is a solution to the problems that integrating new code can cause for development and operations teams .

Specifically, it features continuous automation and continuous monitoring throughout the application lifecycle, from the integration and testing phases to delivery and deployment.

Taken together, these connected practices are often referred to as the “ CI/CD pipeline ” and are supported by development and operations teams working together in an agile manner with a DevOps or Site Reliability Engineering (SRE)  approach. Engineering ).

What is the difference between CI and CD?

The terms CI and CD have different applicability, but they complement each other.

“CI” will always refer to continuous integration , which is an automation process for developers. Successful CI means that new code changes to an application are regularly created, tested, and merged into a shared repository.

It is a solution to the problem of having too many branches of an application under development while they can conflict with each other.

“CD” refers to continuous delivery and/or continuous deployment, which are related concepts and can sometimes be used interchangeably. Both are about automating other stages of the pipeline, but are sometimes used separately to illustrate just how much automation is going on.

In short, CI is a set of practices performed while developers write code and CD is a set of practices performed after code completion.

How to differentiate CI/CD from DevOps in general?

You need to understand that the pipeline is part of the broader DevOps/DevSecOps framework, while DevOps is a set of practices and capabilities designed to increase a business’s ability to deliver software and services faster than traditional development processes. .

In a DevOps space, successful companies “build security” into every step and flow of the development lifecycle, a practice called DevSecOps.

See the differences between CI/CD and DevOps:

Main tools for CI/CD

Gitlab is a very attractive application made up of diverse tools and resources to help developers in their DevOps process.

You can have your own on-premises or public cloud instance, or even use the SaaS offering hosted by GitLab! It is free in both cases.

Another thing is that many teams use feature flags, a configuration mechanism to enable or disable features and code at runtime.

Features still in development are bundled with feature flags in code, deployed with the main branch to production, and retired until they are ready to be used.

In recent research, DevOps teams using feature flags have seen a ninefold increase in development frequency. Resource flagging tools like CloudBees , Optimizely Rollouts , and LaunchDarkly integrate with CI/CD tools to support resource-level configurations.

Once the development team has selected a CI/CD tool, it must ensure that all environment variables are configured outside of the application.

CI/CD tools allow development teams to define these variables, mask variables such as passwords and account keys, and configure them at deployment time to the target environment.

Examples of using CI/CD

Imagine a work environment in which several developers work simultaneously integrating code into the main branch of a common repository.

Rather than creating resources in isolation and submitting each one at the end of the cycle, a professional strives to contribute software work products to the repository multiple times in any given day. Much easier, right?