What is CI/CD?

CI/CD stands for Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (or Deployment). It's a set of practices and tools used by modern software teams to ship code faster, safer, and more reliably. CI/CD is a cornerstone of DevOps culture and is essential for any team trying to automate their development workflow and deliver software continuously.

CI: Continuous Integration

Continuous Integration is about automatically building and testing your code every time you push to your version control system (like Git). Instead of waiting days or weeks to integrate everyone's code and running into conflicts or bugs, CI ensures you catch issues early.

What usually happens in a CI pipeline:

• Pull request is opened or code is pushed
• Automated build is triggered
• Unit and integration tests run
• Linting, static analysis, and type checks

CD: Continuous Delivery vs Continuous Deployment

Continuous Delivery means your code is always in a deployable state. After CI, the CD pipeline takes over to prepare artifacts and environment changes.

Continuous Deployment takes it a step further: every successful commit is deployed to production automatically (with no human intervention).

Stages might include:

• Packaging and containerizing apps
• Running e2e and smoke tests
• Deploying to staging environments
• Automatically pushing to production (in Deployment)

Why It Matters:

• Faster iteration: Deploy features, fixes, and experiments quickly
• Higher confidence: Automated tests reduce regressions
• Fewer merge conflicts: Smaller, frequent changes are easier to integrate
• Smaller failures: If something breaks, it's easier to trace
• Better team velocity: Devs aren't blocked by long feedback loops

CI/CD Tools You'll See:

• GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, CircleCI, Travis CI
• Jenkins, TeamCity, Buildkite
• Argo CD, Spinnaker, Flux (for Kubernetes CD)
• Terraform Cloud (for infrastructure pipelines)

CI/CD in Action:

Picture a team working on a SaaS product. Every time a dev pushes a commit:

• Code is linted, tested, and built
• Docker image is created
• Image is deployed to a staging environment
• Feature flags control whether it's exposed to users
• If approved, code is deployed to production automatically

This kind of automation means fewer bugs, faster shipping, and more consistent infrastructure.

Common Pitfalls:

• Lack of test coverage = false confidence
• Slow pipelines = developer frustration
• Missing rollback strategies = painful outages
• Skipping staging = surprises in production

CI/CD and DevOps:

CI/CD is foundational in a DevOps workflow. It enables continuous feedback and blurs the line between dev and ops by automating build, test, and release.

Not every team does both CI and CD fully — and that's okay. Even just CI with manual deployments is a major step forward from manual build/test/release cycles.