What is CI/CD?

Continuous Integration

Continuous Integration is an automation strategy to solve merge conflicts arising between individual developers’ code and separate code branches. CI enables teams to build workflows capable of compiling frequent code changes, building applications, and testing the newer versions for bugs and errors. After passing through the test suite, the updates are ready for the next stage of the development process.

By frequently merging changes in a shared branch, commonly known as a trunk branch, CI offers an effective solution against merge conflicts. Also, it eliminates the need to wait until the end of the coding stage to combine separate branches, reducing the complexity of issues that may occur and making them easier to resolve.

Continuous Delivery

After the code is bug tested, it is directly sent to a shared repository, for instance, GitHub. Continuous Delivery aims to boost communication between the development and operations teams by increasing the velocity at which production-ready code is delivered. It allows operations teams to deploy applications with fewer complications.

However, without a functional CI, Continuous Delivery is less effective, and therefore, testing in CI is crucial for validating the code before release. This step prevents defective code from being pushed into production. A streamlined continuous integration/delivery process paves the way for effective continuous deployment.