Pipeline, Continuous Integration & Deployment
Designing software can be a complex process, especially when applications are developed in a team and changes are deployed frequently, giving rise to complexity. Often, challenges for developing & testing, deploying software quickly, and invariably become prominent as projects grow. The engineers in organizations constructed distinct automated processes that run sequentially.
The distinct automated processes consist of CI & CD (continuous integration & deployment) methods. The CI concentrates on collaborative development and gives continuous monitoring throughout the phase of integrating code from several individuals into the source repository, testing, and quality check. Accordingly, the CD provides steps for deployment automatically each time the new changes are pushed. Thus combining CI & CD practices is often known as creating a pipeline that helps devs and test teams work jointly in an agile manner.
CI & CD pipeline gives automation and ongoing monitoring throughout the SDLC phases. It involves the sequence of CI & CD steps that build code including running test cases and automatically deploying your code to the production server. These sequentially interconnected steps are known as CI & CD pipelines.
The invention of CI & CD is a solution to the problems of integrating new code push from devs and test teams, which may lead to integration hell. To avoid such integration hell scenarios, using CI & CD practices are necessary.
Continuous Integration
In the software development world, numerous developers work simultaneously in isolation, enhancing distinct features of the same application. At the time of merging changes of each isolated working developer, there is a possibility of conflict with other developer changes. Thus the code merging activity becomes costly and ends with error-prone, time-intensive merge critical changes. To avoid this problem, developers in organizations follow continuous integration practices to maintain the software development life cycle.
Continuous integration is a convention that facilitates developers to combine their code changes made for enhancing distinct features into the source branch frequently with multiple integrations a day, rather than improving several features in seclusion and merging at the end of a development process. Here CI is a vision to reduce integration expenditure and consider the early review with ongoing monitoring. The ongoing monitoring locates conflicts between current and incoming code changes. Accepting one of the changes continues with an assurance that the latest code keeps the essentials of the existing code.
Merging frequent changes does not assure the new code quality or functionality. To maintain functionality & quality, the continuous integration depends on test cases as part of the build process. When a developer merges code into the source repository, it triggers the build process containing the command of downloading packages, checking vulnerabilities, and running test cases to check whether any problems were raised. If a build is broken, then the team receives an alert to fix the build pipeline. Thus resolving the broken build pipeline is the highest priority.
The objective of continuous integration is to automate workflow, frequent commits, multiple integrations a day, and debug integration issues early & easily. Therefore following CI practices completes the software development life cycle smoothly.
CI Practices to Follow
- Preserve a common repository used by developers for code commits.
- Automate the build pipeline containing downloading packages, checking vulnerabilities, and running test cases.
- Frequently commits multiple integrations a day.
- Send an alert notification to the team when a build is broken.
- Keeping the build green is the highest priority.
Continuous Deployment
Continuous deployment is connected to Continuous integration and keeps the application at the deployable phase. It is the regular automatic deployment of applications or new features. Therefore, when any code commits from developers runs a build process containing testing, then released to a production environment only when the build is green.
The deployment process is entirely automatic without any manual intervention, and if the build process is not green, it precludes the deployment to the production server. Automatic deployments push error-free components and new features to applications. It also provides quick feedback as clients wait for the new feature release, and there is no stress on a team on the feature deployment date. Thus, developers concentrate on designing the new feature for the application that will go live in the next deployment.
Continuous deployment offers various advantages for businesses examining how to scale their applications and portfolios. Preferably, it automatically deploys changes and makes application new features available to clients from time to time by eliminating the lag between coding and client value, generally daily, weekly, and biweekly.
Continuous deployment does not require any human intervention, it automatically deploys the changes for production release as the build process is green.
CD Practices to Follow
- Continuous integration must function pleasingly, and the build process includes testing must have acceptable test coverage.
- Short pieces of changes for production release get more comfortable to debug and bug fixes.
- In the continuous deployment process a production release is automatic as the code is committed, pushed, and the build process includes testing is green.
Pipeline
A pipeline contains a sequence of operations run sequentially that carry your code to the production environment. All the automated functions and the outcome of one function supply input to the successive one. The ongoing monitoring assures the code quality and is error-free. Whenever new changes are committed to code, an automated pipeline starts running, finds all possible problems, and is solved instantly, ensuring the application is bug-free. Hence the CI & CD are the compositions of a pipeline.
Basic GitLab Pipeline Architecture
Pipelines are the essential structure for CI & CD in GitLab that have several stages tied to the significant task that needs to be performed. The basic structure of the pipeline is as follows:
The above structure of the gitlab-ci.yml file shows the basic structure of the pipeline that builds your code by downloading dependencies, running test cases, and releasing the application to the production environment.
Conclusion
CI & CD are the concepts that implement pipeline shows continuous monitoring of the software development life cycle. CI & CD helps in integration & deploying your codebase to the production environment following quality checks and avoiding integration hell problems.
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