nugglet

nugglet

Robotics and Computer Vision Researcher @ Robotics Innovation Lab, Gamer, (future) Dog Owner

Continuous Integration and Deployment (CI/CD)

1 minute read

Published:

CI: Continuous Integration CD: Continuous Deployment CI/CD refers to an automated testing pipeline. This article provides a brief overview of the CI/CD pipeline, and frameworks that provide CI/CD services.

Continuous Integration vs Continuous Deployment

CI automates building and testing of software. CD is an extension of CI. It allows software to be deployed after every code commit that passes your test suite.

3 Parts of a CI/CD Pipeline

  1. Build Stage
    • Multiple teams pushing code to a repository (e.g. github)
    • Commit conflicts arise due to quickly increasing code complexity and difference in code styles (e.g. env, tooling, code quality)
    • Including build process in the pipeline automates dev contributions and provides tools to standardize quality and dev environments
  2. Testing Stage
    • Different types of testing can be used together in an automated CI pipeline (i.e. unit + integration testing)
    • Testing measures vital data about software performance that can be integrated back into the code. This results in higher quality software with fewer bugs.
  3. Deploy Stage
    • Deployment strategy configures the release of software to production or other envs.
    • The pipeline can be configured to deploy on a schedule, select which group of customers to roll updates to, or roll back releases if there are issues.

CI Configurations

CI configurations are usually stored in some config file.

  • Workflows: Allows you to run and troubleshoot jobs separately so you can see failed builds in real time (sort of like a framework that facilitates unit testing)
  • Jobs: Collections of steps that are executed in a single unit. Workflows are the set of rules that define a set of jobs and run order.
  • Config steps: a list of key-value pairs where key = type of step and value = config map or string . When a step is run, you can specify which command to execute as a string value.
  • Different CI frameworks may also have additional task configurations and classes to optimize the CI/CD build.

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