The Role of Automation in Building Software and How CI/CD Build Processes Work in Your Organization

In today's fast-paced digital landscape, businesses must rapidly deliver high-quality software products and services to stay competitive. Automation is key to achieving this goal, and Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) build processes play a vital role in streamlining software development.

What is Automation?

Automation uses technology to perform manual tasks, freeing up resources for strategic activities. In software development, automation can:

• Build code
• Test code
• Deploy code
• Monitor applications

What is CI/CD?

CI/CD is a set of practices that automate software development, ensuring faster time-to-market and improved quality. It consists of:

• Continuous Integration (CI): Regularly integrating code changes into a shared repository to identify and fix bugs early.
• Continuous Delivery (CD): Automatically deploying code changes to production, ensuring rapid release of new features and bug fixes.

How CI/CD Build Processes Work

A CI/CD pipeline automates software development through the following steps:

1. Build: Compiling and building code into an executable file.
2. Test: Verifying code functionality through automated testing.
3. Deploy: Deploying code to a staging environment.
4. Verify: Validating code in the staging environment.
5. Deploy to Production: Releasing code to production.

Automation Tooling

Popular automation tools include:

• Jenkins: An open-source automation server for building, testing, and deploying code.
• Travis CI: A cloud-based CI/CD service for automating software development.
• Ansible: An open-source automation tool for deploying code and managing infrastructure.

Implementing CI/CD in Large Corporate IT Environments

In a large corporate IT environment like CIBC, a CI/CD pipeline is built and operated using a combination of tools and technologies tailored to the organization's needs. This may involve:

• Using Jenkins, Travis CI, and Ansible for automation.
• Leveraging cloud-based services like AWS and Azure.
• Utilizing data centers and servers for building, testing, and deploying code.

Conclusion

Automation is crucial in software development, and CI/CD build processes are essential for efficient software delivery. By adopting automation and CI/CD, organizations can:

• Speed up software delivery
• Improve quality
• Reduce costs