Continuous integration and continuous delivery

Continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD) enable DevOps teams to increase the speed of software development and deliver better quality code, faster. Continuous integration works to implement code from your team in a shared repository which vastly improves your deployment pipeline. Developers that employ full CI/-CD share their new code in a merge (pull) request, which triggers a pipeline to build, test, and validate the new code before merging the changes in the repository. Continuous delivery deploys CI-validated code to your application.

All code is tested throughout each stage to secure better quality builds and applications with fewer bugs. CI/CD pipelines can determine what happens when builds pass or fail these tests, meaning that errors are identified much faster. As code goes through each stage of the development process, it’s continually validated against many other changes in the repository happening concurrently, which ensures code integrity throughout the pipeline. Together, CI and CD accelerate how quickly your team delivers results for your customers and stakeholders.

Continuous delivery is often used interchangeably with a continuous deployment release process, but there is a subtle difference between the two. Continuous deployment means that all validated code deploys to production automatically, whereas continuous delivery means that this code can be deployed. The flexibility for code to be deployed at any time is what differentiates delivery from deployment, and practicing continuous deployment is possible when continuous delivery is already in place.

Continuous Integration is the practice of integrating code into a shared repository and building/testing each change automatically, as early as possible – usually several times a day.

Continuous Delivery ensures CI-validated code can be released to production at any time.

Continuous delivery is often used interchangeably with a continuous deployment release process, but there is a subtle difference between the two. Continuous deployment means that all validated code deploys to production automatically, whereas continuous delivery means that this code can be deployed. The flexibility for code to be deployed at any time is what differentiates delivery from deployment, and practicing continuous deployment is possible when continuous delivery is already in place.

What are the benefits of CI/CD?

1. More time for innovation
2. Better retention rates
3. More revenue
4. Business efficiency

Learn more about the benefits of continuous integration →