How to implement effective CICD pipeline?

The CI/CD pipeline has become the latest buzzword in the past few years. A wide assortment of business enterprises is adopting CI/CD pipeline to streamline the software development process. Modern workflows play an integral role in making life easy for everyone.

Speaking of the DevOps environment, both accuracy and productivity are known to be crucial. Owing to this, development automation is featured properly across a wide array of software development modalities. The CI/CD pipeline involves the implementation of a plethora of robust QA testing practices.

Such types of automated testing methodologies reduce the efforts and time, necessary to execute the manual testing processes, thereby improving them. Once the problems are diagnosed at an early phase, you should ensure that the bug is fixed in a specific place. It plays an integral role in streamlining the process additionally.

What are CI and CD?

The ultimate goal of CI or Continuous Integration is offering an automated and consistent way to package, test, and develop the apps. The CI processes play an integral role in enhancing the chances to introduce changes in the code, thereby enhancing collaboration and software quality.

CI provides a suitable opportunity for everyone present in the software development team to work on the most updated code. Besides this, it allows the earlier detection of integration bugs and errors. It decreases the maintenance costs and fixes the bugs at a later off phase.

CD or Continuous Delivery assures that certain changes in the code, like bug fixes, features, and configuration changes can offer a helping hand in introducing certain changes in the production system in a sustainable, safe and quick way.

The CD pipeline offers a helping hand in achieving the goals through the process of automation. Thus, it plays an integral role in making the whole process less error-prone. Execution of the automated posts on every code builds ensures the developers and different stakeholders that the checked-in code boasts of specific baseline quality. Another goal of Continuous Delivery is decreasing the time, which is necessary for the code deployment into the production. DevOps services company will help these effective process.

Steps to implement effective CI/CD pipeline

In this article, we will tell you about certain steps, which should be followed to implement the CI/CD pipeline:

Source

It is essential to complete every subsequent phase before moving to the next phase. It is necessary to track every phase to find the errors, glitches, and other discrepancies after which feedback and review are offered to the delivery team. Speaking of the agile content, every development will be included within the CI/CD pipeline before its deployment into production.

Source Stage

It is recognized to be the primary phase of the CI/CD pipeline. Speaking of the phase, the CI/CD pipeline will be triggered with certain changes in the preconfigured flag of the program within the repo or code repository. Such kind of phase emphasized the tracking changes, covering version control and source control.

Once the automated workflow finds any change within the central repository, it might trigger certain tasks, like unit testing, code compilation. A few of the common tools, which are included in the source stage are SVN, GIT, AWS CodeCommit, Azure Repos, to name a few.

Build Stage

It happens to be the next phase for the implementation of the CI/CD pipeline. It is considered to be the combination of the source code along with the dependencies to the runnable/executable development instance.

Such type of phase will cover the software builds along with different types of buildable objects. This phase is known to be a crucial phase. If there is any sort of failure in the build, it is an indication that there might be some fundamental problems within the underlying code.

Such a stage boasts of build artifact handling. You can centralize the building artifacts' storage process with the aid of the centralized artifact repository, such as JFrog, Yarn, and a cloud-based solution. It provides the capabilities to roll to the past build.

It helps in checking whether there are any certain problems in the latest build. A few of the crucial tools which support the specific build stage are Jenkins, Gradle, Travis CI, AWS Code Build, Azure Pipelines, to name a few.

Test Phase

It is another phase of CI-CD pipeline implementation that includes automated testing. It offers a helping hand in validating and verifying the software behavior. The ultimate objective of such a phase is the prevention of software bugs, errors, and glitches.

It is possible to integrate different kinds of testing, such as functional testing, integration testing within the phase. Such kind of phase will expose all kinds of errors and mistakes, present in the product. A few of the common test tools are Jest, Appium, Selenium, Puppeteer, PHPUnit, and Playwright, to name a few.

Deploy Phase

It is recognized to be the ultimate phase of the CI/CD pipeline. Once you have completed all the above-mentioned phases, the package can be deployed easily. In the specific phase, you can deploy the package to the prerequisite environment, to the staging environment to the quality assurance, and to the production environment.

It is possible to adapt the specific phase to support all types of the deployment strategy, such as canary deployments, blue-green deployments, and in-place deployments. Such kind deployment phases are inclusive of configuration, infrastructure provisioning, and containerization through the use of different technologies, such as Docker, Puppet, Terraform, Kubernetes. Other tools are Chef, Ansible, AWS Elastic Beanstalk, Azure Pipelines - Deployment, to name a few.

There are a plethora of practices, which can be followed to implement the CI/CD pipeline. CI/CD pipeline offers a plethora of benefits. The team can make the right use of CI/CD pipeline to improve the release cycles. It helps in refining the bug and error fix workflows. They can make the right use of upgraded code quality for collaboration across the latest initiatives.

A few of the primary benefits of CI/CD pipeline are improved test reliability, backlog reduction, decreased review time, fewer changes, fault isolation, fault detection, quicker time to Resolution, usability improvements through end-user feedback, enhanced MTTR, to name a few.