Continuous Integration and Deployment
Building a Comprehensive CI/CD Strategy for Faster Software Delivery
A comprehensive CI/CD strategy can help achieve continuous integration and delivery of reliable software at high speed. Architech NYC offers expert assistance in building and implementing such a strategy tailored to your specific needs.
What is CI/CD
A risk-reducing approach that enables more frequent and incremental updates to applications in production.
Continuous integration (CI)
Continuous integration (CI) is the process of frequently merging individual developers' work products into a central repository to detect integration bugs early and facilitate greater collaboration and cohesion among developers.
Continuous Delivery (CD)
Continuous Delivery is an agile software development approach that involves producing software in short iterations and employing processes to ensure its dependable deployment into production environments whenever required.
CI/CD pipelines
Build
The codebase is checked out to a specific version and artifacts (e.g., Docker containers) are built.
Deploy
Artifacts are deployed into an environment.
Test
Tests (unit, integration, vulnerability, performance, etc.) are performed to ensure application quality.
Approve
User determines whether a pipeline should proceed to the next stage.
A pipeline is a sequence of steps involved in taking a version of an application codebase and ensuring its successful release to production. These steps can be initiated either manually or automatically when changes are made to the codebase. Typically, pipelines consist of various stages, with the most common ones being the following four.
CI/CD spectrum
Manual
./deploy.sh
Baked-in automation
Out of the box CI/CD features of the service
Dev-centric CI/CD
Repo is source of truth and control plane for CI/CD automation Easy to adopt hosted SaaS services
Ops-centric CI/CD
Single-pane of glass across deployed services with integrated monitoring Trade mgmt effort for configurability
Cloud Build workflow
Source code
Build step
Build step
Build step
Build step
/workspace
Best practices for effective pipelines
Quality:
Our approach ensures that all changes are extensively tested before deployment to production. We conduct safe production deployments, utilizing methods such as canary or blue/green to minimize risks, and in the event of a failure, we trigger an automatic rollback to the previous version.
Speed:
Our pipelines are entirely automated, except for manual-approval gates. We ensure that there are no bottlenecks that delay the promotion of a given code change, which could prevent other critical changes from being promoted.
Visibility:
We integrate our pipelines fully with the SCM branching and merging strategy. Our pipeline sends alerts to the relevant stakeholders in the event of important events such as failures. We also ensure that each artifact has metadata that allows tracing of its production and pipeline path.
Scalability:
Our pipeline design organizes stages common to different pipelines into a library to maximize scalability.
Example marketplace CI/CD tools
Continuous Integration in practice
Continuous integration is a fundamental software development practice in DevOps, where developers regularly merge their code changes into a central repository, triggering automated builds and tests. This approach typically applies to the build or integration stage of the software release process and requires both automation tools (e.g., CI or build service) and a cultural shift towards frequent integration. Continuous integration aims to identify and resolve issues swiftly, improve software quality, and minimize the time taken to validate and release new software updates.
The Importance of Continuous Integration
The practice of continuous integration has become increasingly important in modern software development. Instead of working in isolation for extended periods of time and merging changes only once a project is complete, continuous integration involves regular code merges and automated testing. This approach helps to catch bugs and errors early in the development process, reducing the risk of larger issues arising later on. Continuous integration also makes it easier to deliver updates quickly and efficiently, keeping customers happy and satisfied. Without continuous integration, software development can be slower, less reliable, and more prone to errors.
Understanding the Mechanism of Continuous Integration
Continuous integration is a software development approach that involves frequent commits to a shared repository using a version control system like Git. Before each commit, developers may run local unit tests to ensure code quality. Once committed, the continuous integration service automatically builds and runs unit tests on the new code changes, instantly identifying any errors that may arise. This helps to prevent bugs from accumulating and allows developers to quickly detect and fix issues, improving software quality and reducing the time it takes to deliver updates.
Benefits of Continuous Integration
Improving Developer Productivity
Continuous integration improves developer productivity by automating manual tasks and promoting practices that reduce the likelihood of errors and bugs being released to customers.
Faster Bug Detection and Resolution
Continuous integration enables more frequent testing, which helps your team detect and address bugs earlier in the development process before they become more significant issues.
Accelerated Delivery of Updates
By automating the build and testing stages of the software release process, continuous integration helps your team deliver updates to customers more rapidly and frequently, ensuring they receive the latest features and improvements in a timely manner.
Understanding Continuous Delivery
Continuous delivery is a software development practice that automates the process of preparing code changes for a production release. It builds on the principles of continuous integration by taking code changes and deploying them to a testing environment and/or a production environment after the build stage. Continuous delivery ensures that developers always have a deployment-ready artifact that has passed through a standardized testing process. The automation of testing beyond unit tests allows developers to validate application updates across various dimensions, including UI testing, load testing, integration testing, API reliability testing, and more. This approach helps developers detect issues earlier and more comprehensively, reducing the risk of releasing buggy code. Cloud computing has made it cost-effective and easy to automate the creation and replication of multiple environments for testing, which was previously challenging to achieve on-premises.
Continuous Delivery vs. Continuous Deployment
Continuous delivery involves building, testing, and pushing code changes to a non-production testing or staging environment. There can be several parallel test stages before a production deployment. In contrast, continuous deployment automatically deploys code changes to production without the need for explicit approval. The primary difference between continuous delivery and continuous deployment is the presence of a manual approval step in the former.
Continuous delivery streamlines the entire software release process by initiating an automated flow that includes building, testing, and staging updates whenever a new revision is committed. While this automated flow can handle the majority of the software release process, the ultimate decision to deploy to a live production environment is made by the developer.
Benefits of Continuous Delivery
Find and Address Bugs Quicker
By implementing continuous delivery, your team can detect and address bugs at an early stage before they become critical issues. Frequent and comprehensive testing allows for more types of tests to be performed on the code, thanks to the fully automated process.
Deliver Updates Faster
Continuous delivery ensures faster and more frequent delivery of software updates to customers. With the standardized test process, the team can easily deploy a build artifact that is ready for production at any time.
Improve Developer Productivity
Continuous delivery frees developers from manual tasks and encourages behaviors that reduce the number of errors and bugs in the software release process. By automating the entire process, developers can focus on more valuable tasks, improving productivity, and reducing workload.
Automating the Software Release Process
By implementing continuous delivery, your team can automatically build, test, and prepare code changes for release to production. This helps to increase the efficiency and speed of your software delivery process.
What we Offer as DevOps Services
Architech NYC builds software delivery processes from the ground up using DevOps methodologies, and also improves existing processes for software design, deployment, QA, and testing. We prioritize the quality of the code by creating DevOps environments that allow organizations to have complete control over each line of code and ensure the integrity of all delivery pipelines.
DevOps evaluation
We conduct an examination of existing infrastructures and software delivery processes to identify any obstacles and provide a practical optimization plan that covers your entire technological stack, software workflows, and human resources’ workload.
DevOps automation
Our DevOps automation services involve implementing a comprehensive toolkit that automates multiple aspects of software development, such as code review, deployment, continuous testing, and knowledge management. We also provide training to your teams to operate efficiently in the automated environment.
DevOps as a Service
We offer a comprehensive range of DevOps services to help businesses modernize their software delivery processes and increase productivity. Our DevOps as a Service includes strategy development, automation, management, and assessment, all tailored to the specific needs of each client. We take care of the DevOps ecosystem, so our clients can focus on their core business objectives.