What You Need to Know About Continuous Delivery Pipeline

What You Need to Know About Continuous Delivery Pipeline

Every DevOps technique is centered on a CI/CD pipeline. It entails releasing to production and continuously integrating with no downtime. Therefore, Continuous Integration & Continuous Delivery, two terms that frequently refer to automation, are combined to form CI/CD.

A frequent code commitment to a shared repository is a requirement of the continuous integration (CI) development strategy. After that, each check-in is verified automatically, enabling teams to find issues as they arise.

A DevOps practice called Continuous Delivery (CD) allows for faster and more predictable software releases. Every change, no matter how small or significant, can be made available to users at any time through a quick and automated process that enables the release of new software versions without interfering with daily business operations. This is known as continuous delivery.

This article aims to provide you with an overview of the many things to take into account when developing a CI/CD process for your business.

A CI/CD Pipeline is what?

A continuous Automated Integration, Continuous Testing, Continuous Delivery, and Deployment process is known as a CI/CD pipeline.

At its core, CI is an automated procedure that verifies your code in a version management program. When you push fresh commits to the branch it’s keeping an eye on, this process starts up automatically. It can function on various platforms and in a wide range of popular languages, including C++, Java, and Python. CI is not meant to be used manually and is instead focused on automation.

Continuous Delivery (CD) advances Continuous Integration (CI) and accomplishes its objective of deploying high-quality, dependable applications quickly. The ability of continuous delivery depends on a number of variables, including the size, type, and quantity of tests necessary for the application.

Stages of a Continuous Delivery Pipeline

Five stages comprise the CD Pipeline:

1) Checking code into the version control system is known as continuous integration (CI).

2) Build Verification Tests (BVT), which serve to confirm that the build was successful.

3) Testing the application’s UI features using acceptance test automation (ATA) is third.

4) Regression Test Automation (RTA): This technique checks the functionality of application components that have already undergone testing (more on regression testing).

5) Performance Tests – tests that confirm scalability and performance

Continuous Supply Continuous Integration and Pipeline

A continuous delivery pipeline is a collection of connected environments through which application code is delivered to clients or, more generally, from development to production. It includes the steps needed to transition from development to production (or client).

There is no limit to the number of stages that can be in a pipeline. On a dedicated machine inside the stage’s container, stages are run in order.

The software development process and a variety of tasks, including test automation, infrastructure provisioning, configuration, packaging, etc., are handled by the (CD) pipeline.

Coding

The development teams are free to use whatever frameworks or languages they like.

Review of Code

Every modification must be entered into the version control system.

BVT

Based on the team’s definition of what is “ready to push,” CI will automatically run the Build Verification Testing (BVT) as frequently as necessary.

Staging

For additional testing, all successful BVT will be pushed into the deployment environment.

Deployment

All modifications that have successfully completed staging are automatically deployed into production by Continuous Deployment.

Monitoring

We can view the data that the monitoring tool collects from various stages in a dashboard.

Responsibilities for CI

Its four primary duties are as follows:

• Build the code to ensure that it can be compiled.
• Tests should be conducted and passed.
• Perform static analysis to see if the source code adheres to certain coding standards.
• Dependencies – control outside dependencies

Developers can access a dashboard on continuous integration servers like Jenkins to see whether a build was successful or not, whether the tests passed, and other information.

Contrary to Continuous Integration pipelines, (CD) pipelines are more concerned with what must occur after the code has passed all testing. The only distinction is that before deploying production-ready code, additional verification procedures must be carried out. These steps and jobs consist of:

1) Acceptance Testing: All examinations and checks are required to confirm that the modification is prepared for production.

2) Manual Intervention: At this stage, a person needs to take some action, like running final manual QA tests or making sure the system will adhere to specifications after deployment. Once they give their approval, it is immediately released.

3) Release: In this step, changes are applied to live systems or external systems, and the outcomes are displayed in a dashboard.

Differentiating Continuous Delivery from Continuous Integration

Continuous Deployment (CD) and Continuous Integration (CI) both include CI. But CI isn’t only for these phases. From writing code to releasing software into production, it’s critical to every stage of the event cycle.

CI’s main objective is to confirm that your code is functional, compiling, and spending tests. Your software is deployed to a production environment due to (CD).

CI is the process of running automated tests for every change made to the code within the repository, ensuring that you just are immediately responsive to any issues with the new code and who is guilty of them. Everyone on the project is informed that their work has been successfully finished when CI automatically checks the code into the most branch of your repository when all test cases pass.

No matter what’s happening within your team, (CD) may be a set of principles and practices that permits you to deliver production-ready software to customers at any time.

CI is the process of running automated tests for every change made to the code within the repository, ensuring that you just are immediately attentive to any issues with the new code and who is accountable for them. Everyone on the project is informed that their work has been successfully finished when CI automatically checks the code into the most branch of your repository when all test cases pass.

Changes made by developers are automatically integrated with most branches and deployed to production as soon as all tests pass after being pushed to source control in CD.

But before deployments can happen, there must be some confirmation that every test passes before the CD process can start. A method to make sure that your code satisfies quality requirements is through continuous integration (CI). Through the IDE (Integrated Development Environment), CI involves fitting a procedure whereby all code is run automatically as soon as something has been checked in.

Pipeline Pitfalls in CI/CD

Be mindful of the subsequent pitfalls when implementing the CI/CD pipeline:

• Making a bottleneck within the CI/CD pipeline process may be a trap that a lot of organizations constitute. Your pipeline’s primary goal is to make sure that each code passes all tests which nobody checks in code that hasn’t been tested. Your pipeline won’t work well if developers must await those functioning on the identical branch to end before their code is deployed.
• If you wrote tests for other people’s code to pass CI testing before being checked in and deployed, that might be beneficial. As a result, there’s a bottleneck at the CI’s first stage, where every developer is checking in code. Your pipeline will run faster and more effectively if nobody waits for others to end.
• Not properly scaling their CI/CD system is another trap that companies comprise. Before expanding your CI/CD implementation to incorporate all tasks, you would possibly want to start out small when implementing it for the primary time by starting with one or two tasks.
• Make sure that your resources are appropriately scaled to handle the CI/CD process if you’re performing a bigger implementation. If you have got too many builds or test agents, the pipeline will become congested and development teams must wait longer for or her code changes to pass testing before they will be deployed.

Reasons to Use a CI/CD Pipeline

The main advantage of the CI/CD pipeline is that it increases the predictability of your software delivery process by allowing you to determine what’s being checked in, run unit tests, and deploy software. Achieving both automation and consistency.

Everyone is informed of the status of the code due to this transparency, which prevents any delays or issues with production deployment. Additionally, it provides a way for you to test your code before pushing it into production.

The opportunity for development teams to check their code before putting it into production is the CI/CD pipeline’s second advantage. The CI/CD pipeline gives you the chance to prevent code from being deployed to production as a result of a blunder that ought to be caught because the more developers you have got, the more likely it’s that somebody will sign on code that does not pass QA testing or doesn’t work correctly.

Finishing it Off

The CI-CD pipeline may be a workflow that allows teams to develop and deploy new features more quickly, just in case you are not at home with it. It functions by dividing development into two phases: (CI) and (CD). So as to check code changes quickly, developers work on them in small batches during the CI stage.

Before any code moves on to the subsequent stage of the procedure, which is remarked as (CD). Because of the very fact that this final step entails assembling all finished features without delay and getting them ready for production release, it’s commonly abbreviated as “delivery” by users. If your team hasn’t yet adopted CI/CD, there are many advantages waiting for you after you do!

About Enteros

Enteros offers a patented database performance management SaaS platform. It proactively identifies root causes of complex business-impacting database scalability and performance issues across a growing number of clouds, RDBMS, NoSQL, and machine learning database platforms.