A Beginners Guide to Understanding CI/CD
A high-level overview of Continuous Integration and Delivery, and what it means in plain language understandable by beginners.
Introduction
In the modern world of Cloud Native software development, many systems and applications are constantly being developed, tested and delivered multiple times a day. Some of the big-name companies out there have perfected this accelerated development lifecycle and can deploy new code hundreds of times a day like Netflix [1] and even that pales at the numbers achieved by Amazon, which reportedly deploys new code every 11.7 seconds! [2]. So how do they manage to achieve such crazy deployment speeds?
The answer is of course many things, such as the work culture and the developers themselves who are actually writing the code. But, one of the key enablers is the continuous integration and continuous delivery systems that the companies have created to look after their codebases.
Continuous Integration
Continuous Integration, the CI in CI/CD; is the process by which the building, testing and merging of new code to a repository is automated. This automation allows developers to frequently push new code without having to worry about potential application breaking code being introduced as it will be caught by the automated…
