How to effectively build a CI/CD pipeline?

The success in agile software development strongly depends on the ability of team to quickly roll out features to the end users and continuously improve the software by incorporating the feedback from the end users. An efficient CI/CD pipeline would be the key to achieving such quick turnarounds.

Fundamentals of CI/ CD pipeline

· Integration and Verification — In agile development where multiple developers are working on their piece of code and the code is integrated by any of them into main branch, it is essential that a verification step is available that can quickly ensure that the particular integration would not break existing functionality and would not degrade performance or produce any security issue.

· Automation — The verification process should be automated in order to achieve speed of development i.e. this ensures that software is executed in shorter span of time.

· DevOps culture — the development team plays a big role for the continuity and efficiency of the pipeline. If a build fails or test fails?. Fixing such issues should take top priority or otherwise the ultimate idea of speed & returns of the CI/CD process fails.

· Containerization — To reduce much complexity we can do so by deploying the containers.

Fundamentals has their own space while designing a CI/CD pipeline for delivering an enterprise application but it also depends lot on practical challenges specific to the organization or software. Some points to consider are,

· Software development process — It is seen that CI/CD would produce the best performance in an agile environment.

· Unit test coverage — this is a key piece of CI and if you are low on test coverage, it would make sense to work on that prior to implementing the CI/CD pipeline.

· Automation percentage — this would decide whether you can solely depend on automated tests or whether you want to introduce some manual testing also into the process.

· Nature of the test suite — The time taken to execute the tests may need to be considered along with number of tests performed.

The four step approach outlined below.

1.Continuous Integration

2.Continuous Delivery

3.Continuous Testing

4.Controlled Deployment

The version control providers also offer their own stack of CI/CD tools.

· GitLab CI/CD

· Bitbucket Pipelines

The cloud vendors also offer CI/CD tools to fast track integration in the cloud

· AWS CodePipeline

· Azure Pipelines

· GCP Tools

For the last few years Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery has been on the top of the agenda for many agile software development teams. It was recognized to be the foundation for establishing a DevOps practice which most organizations feel to be the key for fast and reliable software delivery and life cycle of software.

An efficient CI/CD pipeline can significantly improve the time to production and help maintain stability and quality of the software being delivered.

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