What is CI/CD?

CI and CD are two acronyms that are often mentioned when people talk about modern development practices. CI stands for Continuous integration and CD stands for Continuous Delivery:

• • Continuous Integration (CI): A practice where developers merge their changes back to the development branch as often as possible. The developer's changes are validated by creating a build and running automated tests against it. By doing this, it helps avoid the integration problems that usually happens when people wait for the release day to merge their changes into the master branch. Continuous integration puts a great emphasis on testing automation to check that the application is not broken whenever new commits are integrated into the development branch.

  • Continuous Delivery (CD): A software engineering approach in which teams produce software in short cycles, ensuring that the software can be reliably released at any time and, when releasing the software. It aims at building, testing, and releasing software with greater speed and frequency. The approach helps reduce the cost, time, and risk of delivering changes by allowing for more incremental updates to applications in production. A straightforward and repeatable deployment process is important for continuous delivery.