In this technology-driven world, CICD (or CI/CD) refers to the combination of continuous integration and continuous deployment. They deal with the set of operating principles that help to enable the development of applications to make alterations in the code more reliably and frequently. They are one among the best practices brought in for DevOps teams. These pipelines construct codes, test the code, and deploys a new version of the application and even automates the software delivery process. They release new updates at a time which are suitable for them.
The Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) involves practices such as continuous development, continuous testing, continuous integration, continuous deployment and continuous monitoring. But the CICD pipeline is the backbone of DevOps operations.
When the Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery (CD) were introduced it entirely changed how developers and testers ship software.
In the execution of Continuous Delivery implementation of codes are frequently changed and operated manually. The speciality of this practice is that anyone can deploy any version of the software at any environment depending upon the demand at the push of a button. Now every modern developer approaches DevOps for building products, but before it was the Waterfall method and then Agile method. In the Agile age, almost all the organizations would deploy software in monthly, quarterly, half-yearly why not even annually. This made the customers not concentrate on the change in application updates as Software as a Service (SaaS) took advantage over the world to update without forcing the customers to download new components.
Continuous Integration (CI)
The continuous integration concentrates to merge the individual developers together into developing the software. This helps to check the software at frequent intervals by the developers. Often this is done several times every day as the vital target is to spot out the early detection of bugs.
The chief idea is to reduce the cost of integration by making the developers proceed it fastly and frequently. The developers often integrate their code into the main respiratory. To reduce the barriers during the task of integration the CI depends on automated testing, however, automated testing varies from continuous testing. Of course, the success in CI is absolutely based on the working culture of the development team, coordination among them and should discuss frequently of the project and finally the eagerness to detect the bugs as early as possible.
When you portray Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment one cannot skip without mentioning Continuous Delivery. It is actually the extension to CI in which the software delivery products are automated further at any time. This will appear through code formats which are always deliverable on the spot.
Continuous Deployment (CD)
The Continuous Deployment (CD) is the extension of Continuous Delivery as the software which is built will automatically deploy when it clears all its tests. During this process, no person is required to decide when and what goes into production.
The organizations that adopt CD will receive instant feedback on new deployments. If there is any defect in the product they make sure it will be easily cured and also the organizations ensure there will be an instant response to their clients. Being the DevOps the new one there is also being a raise in the new automation tool with CI/CD pipeline, as they typically integrate with code respiratory systems like Github and bug detection systems like Jira. For information, the SaaS has become the most popular and demanding delivery tool as they are running in the cloud.