Every stage of the software development life cycle is important in its own way. However, we all know that it is when the code goes into a production environment that the price of an error becomes especially high. It doesn’t matter if it is the first release of your software or a new build with important updates, a serious bug can cost your company and your customers a lot of money.
The solution for this might seem obvious: just carry out more thorough testing. But the longer you spend on testing, the more your customers will have to wait. And what if that new build they are waiting for was meant to fix another significant problem? In the days before DevOps it seemed that the only way to release the new code quickly and safely was to make your developers work extra hours. But today there is a better option, which is setting up CI/CD on your project.
What is CI/CD?
Although it might appear that CI/CD means two things, this DevOps practice actually includes three parts, that is, continuous integration, continuous delivery, and continuous deployment. One of the most important things about each of these processes is that they are automated, which reduces the risk of human error.
Continuous integration presupposes updating the shared code repository every time changes to the source code are made. Instead of rare, large new code additions, developers make small updates more frequently, sometimes multiple times a day.
When multiple developers work on the same software, there is always a possibility of code conflicts appearing. Continuous integration automates the process of updating the code repository, making it easier to integrate code from several developers or even development teams. It also introduces automated testing which allows developers to discover bugs as early as possible and fix them quicker. Only the code that passes the automated checks can be added into the shared repository.
Continuous delivery is the automated process of preparing the completed code for the move to the environment where the new build is needed, either development or production. This practice involves automating the provisioning of infrastructure and checking that the software release has everything required for a successful deployment.
Continuous deployment is the next stage where the product is automatically implemented in the environment. It involves setting the criteria that the code release should meet beforehand, so that they can be checked automatically before the code is deployed.
Together these stages make up a so-called CI/CD pipeline, which streamlines the entire software development process, from making code changes to deploying the updated software into a production environment. Implementing CI/CD removes a lot of time-consuming manual tasks and makes the software development process more efficient and transparent.
Do we need both CI and CD?
In theory, you can start by only implementing continuous integration on your project, but not continuous delivery and deployment. However, if you want to utilize CD, it will be really hard to do it if you don’t set up CI as well. When you don’t have a process in place for updating your shared repository with automatic tests and creating new builds every time there are code changes, you won’t be able to quickly deploy those changes to production and remain sure that there are no serious bugs in the new version.
DevOps and CI/CD
One might ask if CI/CD is the same thing as DevOps. Many companies turn to agile methodology and start implementing DevOps practices to get the software updates and bug fixes to their customers more quickly. The DevOps approach includes multiple tools and practices, and one of them is setting up a CI/CD pipeline.
So we can say that a CI/CD pipeline is just one aspect of the DevOps framework, and, besides that, a part of DevSecOps, which is the practice of integrating security into all the stages of DevOps workflows. Where traditionally security was only taken care of at the final stage of software production, DevSecOps injects security practices into every stage of software development life cycle. Modern CI/CD tools are designed with security in mind and help to ensure new software builds don’t compromise safety, no matter how quickly they get released.
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What benefits can CI/CD provide?
Setting up a CI/CD pipeline might seem like a complicated process that requires a dedicated DevOps engineer and can potentially be rather costly. Many organizations still make the choice to adopt this approach, and their number is growing quickly. That is easy to understand, if you take a look at every advantage that CI/CD can ensure.
Fast releases
Traditional software development practice is extremely inefficient. It used to be a process with long pauses. When the development team finished the code changes, they would have to push code and then wait till the testing team could provide feedback on the new code, so that they could fix the discovered bugs before proceeding with any new development.
The inclusion of continuous integration and continuous delivery into the process allows the development workflow to become truly agile. Thanks to automated checks, the developers get rapid feedback in real time so they can fix bugs quickly. Code commits can take place as often as the team needs, and when the checks are passed the new build is created and deployed automatically at once. All this allows the end users to receive new features or critical bug fixes much faster. Some companies release new versions of their software as often as multiple times a day, which definitely gives them a competitive advantage over organizations that still need to perform testing or deployment manually and release new versions once a month or even a year.
Code quality
The opportunity to detect problems early with automated testing has another logical outcome, the code itself is of higher quality by the time it gets to production. All the issues are resolved at earlier stages so when the new build is delivered, you can be sure that it includes high quality code without bugs that can break your whole production site.
It is certainly easier for developers to think of better solutions if they learn about the bugs immediately after they finish developing a certain feature, not days or weeks later. They are still in the same mindset as when building the functionality and don’t need to spend extra time just to remember what it was all about in the first place.
Shorter mean time to resolution (MTTR)
Although automated tests can be very thorough, they are not perfect. Still, when you set up a CI/CD pipeline, you can significantly decrease mean time to resolution (MTTR), which is a metric defining the average time you need to recover your system from a failure. Since code changes are typically smaller, they are easier to review and determine where exactly the problem occurs. Version control management is also an integral part of any properly configured CI/CD pipeline.
As a result, your team can achieve fault isolation or perform a rollback to a stable version quicker, and we all know how important it is to maximize your product uptime. Shorter MTTR means fewer complaints that your application is offline or working incorrectly.
Continuous testing
We have already mentioned that the CI/CD practice involves test automation, but there are more advantages that continuous testing provides than just discovering bugs as early as possible. Manual integration tests and other types of testing are very time-consuming and tiresome for those who perform them. The vast amount of repetitive tasks can take a lot of time that your team could definitely spend on better things.
Automated continuous testing frees up the developers to work on designing further improvements for the development workflow. And although at first they might spend that free time on designing better automated tests to increase test coverage, after all the checks are in place, the free time can be spent on thinking how to make the product itself better and creating innovative solutions.
Furthermore, automated tests are simply better, there is lower risk of missing something important, which is, for example, crucial for security testing. Continuous testing as an integral part of your CI/CD pipeline is the way to guarantee product safety for your customers.
Improved visibility
CI/CD being a part of DevOps means it is a part of a general approach towards communication and collaboration between the various teams in your organization. Thanks to the CI/CD pipeline it becomes possible to increase the transparency of the development process. All stakeholders will be able to track what exactly is happening at what moment, which improves the general understanding of the workflow. This promotes collaboration not only inside the DevOps teams but across the whole company, including, for example, marketing, security, and other departments.
Increased accountability is another advantage of implementing CI/CD. Product managers will find it easier to track team members responsible for specific tasks or check the status of the whole project in no time at all. CI/CD ensures the transparency of the whole process for the business side too, especially with the opportunity for gathering continuous feedback.
Customer satisfaction
There are multiple aspects of CI/CD that help you keep your customers happy. When you can release new builds and updates faster, your end users will get different features before your competitors can offer them something similar. Automated testing and rollback reduce the possibility of serious errors occurring in production and shorten the recovery time in case a bug does get past the tests.
CI/CD makes your product quality noticeably better, and your customers will be quick to notice. And thanks to the possibilities for getting feedback after every incremental code change, you can also learn what your users think of every aspect of the product and use those opinions in your app development process to improve it even further.
Lower costs
Digital transformation is not an easy process, and it takes time and money. So when you start thinking of implementing CI/CD, the potential costs and steps involved in setting it all up might be intimidating.
However, once you get the CI/CD pipeline going, from that moment on you will be saving money in multiple ways. You will free up a lot of time for your developers to actually work on new features and ways to make the code even better, instead of manually testing and deploying the software. Automated infrastructure provisioning is also a part of your CI/CD pipeline, which will make your system easier to scale and as a result, you will spend less on resources that you don’t need all the time.
You can choose the solution that suits your own business purposes best when you decide to adopt CI/CD. For instance, you can build CI/CD tools in-house and choose the exact features you need or acquire managed CI/CD platform services from a provider and save on development. The variety of available tools means you can set up your CI/CD processes exactly the way you want.
Conclusion
It might appear that a properly configured CI/CD pipeline is just another tool that makes developing your product more convenient. However, CI/CD is much more than that, it is a general approach towards building software in a sustainably fast, efficient, and transparent way. It allows you to discover any weaknesses in the development workflow and shortcomings in the source code and then fix these issues as early as possible, way before they can reach your customers.
With continuous integration and continuous delivery you can make sure end users are happy with the uptime and stability of your product, while also spending far less time and effort on the routine parts of the workflow. Adopting CI/CD is one of the factors that will allow your team to concentrate on important tasks and bring real business value to your company.
