CI vs CD vs CD — What Are The Key Differences?

Putting a stop to continuous confusion

When I first started learning about continuous integration and delivery, I had a lot of confusion around the terms and this is probably something a lot of you can relate to. At that time, I haven’t even heard about continuous deployment, so when I did, it just made things worse.

Luckily, I’ve got the chance to meet the world of pipelines. And with that, the fog has been cleared and that made it possible for this article to be born. But what are pipelines? And how it comes into play?

It depends on the context, but since we are talking about software development, a pipeline is a sequence of processes like procedures or commands that are executed in series, one after the other. Sometimes the output of one step is the input for the next. Now before jumping into the details of each continuity, first let’s take a look at what are the steps that makes up a pipeline:

First, code changes made locally are committed and pushed into a central repository. Next, it is checked out by an automated system that builds the project into code pieces that our browsers can understand. Tests are run against it to make sure nothing breaks from our changes. Lastly, it is deployed into its final destination, where end users can reach it.