DevOps culture has gained rapid momentum in the digital world, enabling organizations to adopt agile software delivery methodologies like Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery (CD).
These methodologies enable instant feedback loops, faster issue resolution, improved software quality, and cost reductions, all while meeting the ever-increasing demand to deliver better software faster. Thus, CI/CD practices have become the de-facto software delivery standards across the IT industry.
CI/CD introduces continuous automation and monitoring throughout the software delivery lifecycle, from build, integration, and testing to delivery and deployment.
Together, these methodologies are often called a CI/CD pipeline.
Introduction: CI and CD
Continuous Integration (CI)
Continuous Integration (CI) is continually merging code changes from all developers into a shared repository, after which automated builds and tests are carried out.
It enables developers to integrate code into a shared repository frequently, preferably several times daily. An automated build and automated tests are performed, and then each integration is checked.
The key benefits of CI are that it allows you to identify and fix bugs quicker, enhance software quality, and reduce the time it takes to validate and release new software updates.
Continuous Delivery (CD)
Continuous Delivery (CD) is a software development practice in which code changes are automatically built, tested, configured, and prepared for release to production. It expands upon CI by deploying all code changes to the testing and production environments after the build stage.
With continuous delivery, developers can automate testing beyond unit tests and verify code updates across multiple dimensions before deploying them to customers. Thus, developers can validate updates more thoroughly and discover issues preemptively.
Continuous Deployment – The Other CD
The prime difference between continuous delivery and continuous deployment is the need for manual approval to update to production. Continuous deployment involves automated deployment of the software artifact to the production environment without explicit approval.
Veritis CI/CD Service Offerings
We offer end-to-end DevOps CI/CD services to enable developers and IT operations teams to rapidly and securely deliver software.
Our CI/CD service offerings (as a service) help you securely store and apply version control to your application’s source code.
CI/CD Design Services
- Tooling definition and selection
- CI/CD strategy and roadmap designing
CI/CD Implementation Services
- Current infrastructure analysis
- Addressing bottlenecks
- Tech stack selection
- End-to-end CI/CD implementation
- Maintenance and optimization
CI/CD Consulting Services
- CI/CD pipelines auditing
- Consulting and control of the execution
Our CI/CD Solutions
With a slew of CI/CD tools available in the market, it can be challenging for the Dev and Ops teams to pick the right tools.
Here are some of the best CI/CD tools and their key features to make the selection process easier for your team.
| Detail | CircleCI | TeamCity | Jenkins | Bamboo | GitLab |
| Open-source | No | No | Yes | No | No |
| Ease of use and setup | Medium | Medium | Medium | Medium | Medium |
| Integration | Normal | Good | Excellent | Normal | Good |
| Hosting | Cloud and on-premises | On-premises | Cloud and on-premises | On-premises and Bitbucket as Cloud | Cloud and on-premises |
| Free version | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Build agent license pricing | From USD 39/month | From USD 299 one-off payment | Free | From USD 10 one-off payment | From USD 4 per month per user |
| Supported OSs | Linux, macOS | Windows, Linux, macOS, Solaris, FreeBSD | Windows, Linux, macOS, Unix-like OS | Windows, Linux, macOS, Solaris | Linux distributions: Ubuntu, Debian, CentOS, Oracle Linux |
| Unique Features | • Integrates with Bitbucket, GitHub, and GitHub Enterprise • Easy debugging • Automated parallelization • Continuous, branch-specific deployment | • Runs parallel builds simultaneously on multiple environments • Easy to customize, interact, and extend the server • Keeps CI server functional and stable | • Easy installation and upgradation on various OSs • Simple and user-friendly interface • Supports distributed builds with master-slave architecture | • Supports up to 100 remote build agents • Parallelly runs batches of tests and gets feedback quickly • Easily creates images and pushes them into a registry | • View, create, and manage codes and project data through branching tools • Design, develop, and manage codes and project data from a single version control • Automates and shortens releases and delivery of applications |
Best CI/CD Tools
Some other important CI/CD tools available in the market are:
- Travis CI
- Codefresh
- AWS CodeBuild
- Argo
- Spinnaker
- Flux
- JetBrains
CI/CD Implementation
Organizations must embark on a scalable CI/CD DevOps implementation to harness the full potential of the modern DevOps environment. It lays a strong foundation for enabling an agile DevOps for your business.
Here are the four different stages of CI/CD implementation:
1) Commit
- In this stage, new features and new codes are integrated with the base
- Checking code quality using the feedback system
- Performing a series of unit tests and sanity tests with CI/CD tools
- For example, Jenkins helps automate the complete software development lifecycle
2) Build
- The second stage is built once the code is tested and integrated
- In this stage, developers push the artifacts into the registry
- For example, the Docker tool is used to build servers and deploy the artifacts into the registry so they can be ready for testing
3) Test
- In the testing stage, alpha and beta deployments will take place
- At the alpha deployment stage, developers check the performance of their new builds and the interactions between the builds
- Beta deployment is where manual testing takes place to double-check the application before pushing it to production
4) Production Deployment
- This is the fourth and final stage, where the application goes live
- Once the build passes through all the testing phases successfully, it is ready to be deployed to the production stage for the end-user environment
Business Benefits of CI/CD
The CI/CD methodology broadly offers the following benefits to businesses:
1) Efficient Software Delivery
With continuous delivery, your team can automatically build, test, and prepare code changes for production release, enabling a more efficient and rapid software delivery.
2) Improved Team Productivity
CI/CD practices improve your team’s productivity by freeing developers from manual tasks and reducing the number of errors and bugs deployed to customers.
3) Identify and Fix Bugs Quicker
With CI/CD, your team can perform more frequent and comprehensive testing and quickly identify and address bugs earlier. Continuous delivery enables you to perform additional types of code tests efficiently. The discipline of ‘more tests more frequently’ enables teams to deliver quality code with a high assurance of stability and security.
4) Deliver Updates Faster
Continuous delivery enables faster and more frequent updates to customers. When implemented properly, it will help you always have a deployment-ready build artifact that has passed through a standardized test process.
5) Greater Collaboration
CI/CD promotes closer team communication by enabling development, operational, management, and QA teams to collaborate on technologies, practices, and priorities.
6) Improved MTTR
Smaller code changes and quick fault isolation enabled by CI/CD practices reduce the Mean Time To Resolution (MTTR). CI/CD plays a vital role in keeping failures to a bare minimum and quickly recovering from any failures that do happen.
7) Reduced Costs
Automation in the CI/CD pipeline minimizes errors in the many repetitive steps of CI and CD. It also frees up developers’ time that could be spent on product development as there won’t be many code changes to fix since the errors are identified quickly. Moreover, increasing code quality with CI/CD also increases your ROI.
Veritis as Your Reliable Partner for CI/CD Services
Veritis is a reliable Managed IT Services provider with over a decade of industry presence in delivering end-to-end DevOps services and enabling CI/CD for our customers.
We can help you automate how you build, test, and deploy your applications and ensure cost-efficient and secure software delivery.
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