CI and CD are two acronyms frequently used in modern development practices and DevOps. CI stands for continuous integration, a fundamental DevOps best practice where developers frequently merge code changes into a central repository where automated builds and tests run. But CD can either mean continuous delivery or continuous deployment. Show
What are the differences between continuous integration, continuous delivery, and continuous deployment (CI/CD)?Continuous integrationDevelopers practicing continuous integration merge their changes back to the main branch as often as possible. The developer's changes are validated by creating a build and running automated tests against the build. By doing so, you avoid integration challenges that can happen when waiting for release day to merge changes into the release branch. Continuous integration puts a great emphasis on testing automation to check that the application is not broken whenever new commits are integrated into the main branch. Continuous deliveryContinuous delivery is an extension of continuous integration since it automatically deploys all code changes to a testing and/or production environment after the build stage. This means that on top of automated testing, you have an automated release process and you can deploy your application any time by clicking a button. In theory, with continuous delivery, you can decide to release daily, weekly, fortnightly, or whatever suits your business requirements. However, if you truly want to get the benefits of continuous delivery, you should deploy to production as early as possible to make sure that you release small batches that are easy to troubleshoot in case of a problem. See solutionBuild and operate software with Open DevOpsLearn more Related materialWhat is the DevOps pipeline?Read more Continuous deploymentContinuous deployment goes one step further than continuous delivery. With this practice, every change that passes all stages of your production pipeline is released to your customers. There's no human intervention, and only a failed test will prevent a new change to be deployed to production. Continuous deployment is an excellent way to accelerate the feedback loop with your customers and take pressure off the team as there isn't a "release day" anymore. Developers can focus on building software, and they see their work go live minutes after they've finished working on it. How the practices relate to each otherTo put it simply continuous integration is part of both continuous delivery and continuous deployment. And continuous deployment is like continuous delivery, except that releases happen automatically. What are the benefits of each practice?We've explained the difference between continuous integration, continuous delivery, and continuous deployments but we haven't yet looked into the reasons why you would adopt them. There's an obvious cost to implementing each practice, but it's largely outweighed by their benefits. Continuous integrationWhat you need (cost)
What you gain
Continuous deliveryWhat you need (cost)
What you gain
Continuous deploymentWhat you need (cost)
What you gain
One of the traditional cost associated with continuous integration is the installation and maintenance of a CI server. But you can reduce significantly the cost of adopting these practices by using a cloud service like Bitbucket Pipelines which adds automation to every Bitbucket repository. By simply adding a configuration file at the root of your repository you will be able to create a continuous deployment pipeline that gets executed for every new change pushed to the main branch. Going from continuous integration to continuous deploymentIf you're just getting started on a new project with no users yet, it might be easy for you to deploy every commit to production. You could even start by automating your deployments and releasing your alpha version to production with no customers. Then you can ramp up your testing culture and make sure that you increase code coverage as you build your application. By the time you're ready to onboard users, you will have a great continuous deployment process where all new changes are tested before being automatically released to production. But if you already have an existing application with customers you should slow things down and start with continuous integration and continuous delivery. Start by implementing basic unit tests that get executed automatically -- there's no need to focus yet on running complex end-to-end tests. Instead, you should try automating your deployments as soon as possible and get to a stage where deployments to your staging environments are done automatically. The reason is, if you have automatic deployments, you can focus your energy on improving your tests rather than periodically stopping things to coordinate a release. Once you can start releasing software on a daily basis, you can look into continuous deployment. But make sure that the rest of your organization is ready as well: documentation, support, marketing, etc. These functions will need to adapt to the new cadence of releases, and it is important that they do not miss on significant changes that can impact customers. Read our guidesSten Pittet I've been in the software business for 10 years now in various roles from development to product management. After spending the last 5 years in Atlassian working on Developer Tools I now write about building software. Outside of work I'm sharpening my fathering skills with a wonderful toddler. Share this articleWhich tool is used for continuous integration and continuous deployment?Jenkins. Jenkins is a well-known and most common Continuous Integration tool that is easily available. Based on various comparisons, Jenkins tops the list. Jenkins is an open-source continuous Integration server-based application that allows developers to build, automate and test any software project at a faster pace.
What is enable continuous integration in DevOps?Continuous integration is a DevOps software development practice where developers regularly merge their code changes into a central repository, after which automated builds and tests are run.
Which DevOps tool is used for continuous deployment?Buddy is a DevOps automation platform that allows continuous integration, continuous deployment and feedback. This tool was made for working with projects that use code from the Bitbucket and GitHub repositories.
What enables continuous delivery pipeline?Enabling the Continuous Delivery Pipeline with DevOps
Because this type of delivery system calls for rapid delivery of complex solutions with very short learning loops and high degrees of cross-functional collaboration, DevOps methods are perfectly suited to enabling it.
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