CI/CD Pipeline: Introduction, importance, and challenges

In recent years, DevOps is continuously emerging and it has been bridging the gap between different teams working on the same operation - development, IT, and operational team. CI/CD is an important part of DevOps as it helps developers to develop, test, and launch software faster. In this article, I have explained CI/CD with its benefits and challenges.

What is CI/CD?

CI and CD respectively stand for Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery. They are used to automate the process of software delivery. The pipeline develops code, run tests on it (CI), and then reliably deploys a new version of the software (CD).

Just suppose you have a big team of developers working on an application, and every one of them is responsible for a separate feature or task. Before the final release, your team is working on integrating a number of different features into your application. Just to complete the work in a given time span, you will perform tasks and integrate frequently and this can cause enormous errors.

The errors will burn your time continuously and soon all the things will be messed up. Now think about a service with which you and your team can perform these tasks faster without causing any error. Automated pipelines of CI/CD do the same task for you by removing and reducing manual errors and helping in faster development and tasting. And all this work is automated, Isn't it interesting?

What's the difference between CI and CD?

Continuous Integration (CI): It helps in continuous uploading of changes in an application to a container or GitHub repo where the source code is located. It means if you made a change in any app code then it will be uploaded to the repository directly, will be tested and built there and then it will be to deployed to a live production environment. Developers are free to change code frequently or they can commit several times a day and the complete process will be bugs free.

Thus along with ensuring minimal code deploying efforts, It also helps in communication between developers and business teams as the changes made are sent to the operation team for deployment.

Continuous Delivery (CD): CD belongs to continuous deployment or continuous delivery, which are quite similar and used correspondingly as both of them are used to automate the further steps of the pipeline.

So as the changes have been made by devs in code through CI and now the next step is to deploy these changes, Continuous delivery does the same thing. It is a practice of ensuring faster and stable deployment of the code changes. These changes are deployed to a production environment for testing and deployment after the build stage.

Now the thing is that how Continuous deployment is different from Continuous delivery? both are very same but Continuous deployment is a little bit more automated as the changes made are directly sent to clients or users without any human interaction.

What are the benefits of the CI/CD pipeline?

• It Improves Reliability and reduces manual efforts.
• It makes your team more attractive and helps them in collaboration with different domains.
• Fast and safe building.
• You can change frequently and can integrate new features on a regular basis.
• You can detect bugs earlier and can achieve faster feedback

What are the challenges in implementing a successful CI/CD pipeline?

• Sometimes the infrastructure cost can be higher. A big part of the budget gets into ensuring and maintaining a setup.
• Although it helps different teams in collaboration, it may lead to a lack of communication and human interaction.
• Lack of testing and broken builds.
• Unwanted use of servers and resources.

Conclusion

Although there are some challenges still an automated CI/CD pipeline is worth is the challenges. You just need to maintain and ensure all the things.