Summary
CI/CD stands for Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (or Deployment), and refers to a set of practices and tooling that automate the process of integrating code changes, running tests, and delivering software to production.
What is CI/CD?
CI/CD is an umbrella term that combines two closely related practices. Continuous Integration (CI) focuses on automatically building and testing every code change as it is merged into a shared repository. This catches integration bugs early and keeps the codebase in a consistently releasable state.
Continuous Delivery (CD) extends CI by automatically preparing every passing build for release to a staging or production environment. The deployment itself may still require a manual approval step. Continuous Deployment goes one step further by removing that manual gate entirely.
A CI/CD pipeline is typically implemented as a series of automated stages: source code checkout, build, unit tests, integration tests, security scans, artifact publishing, and deployment. Popular tools include Jenkins, GitHub Actions, and GitLab CI.
Why is CI/CD relevant?
- Faster time to market: Automated pipelines reduce the time from code commit to production release
- Higher software quality: Automated testing catches bugs early before they reach end users
- Reduced deployment risk: Small, frequent releases are easier to debug and roll back than large batch releases