7 Best CI/CD Pipeline Patterns for Deploying Software

Nowadays, enterprises look forward to delivering their software as early as possible. And for this, they must bridge the gap between rapid development and operational stability. Organizations can leverage approaches like CI/CD and DevOps to achieve this goal. But most enterprises get skeptical regarding the CI/CD vs. DevOps mystery. 

Despite systems becoming complex, our expectations for best performance remain the same. Therefore, having a safer and faster way of getting your changes into production is critical. Unfortunately, scripts would not be modified and executed multiple times. Also, you need to understand and differentiate various methodologies. 

So, a reliable CI/CD pipeline is crucial for your engineering team to deliver bug-free code at high velocity over time. This blog post offers a detailed overview of seven CI/CD pipeline design patterns to help you increase transparency, autonomy, and maintainability of the deployment processes.

What Is a Pipeline?

A pipeline is the agile DevOps workflow transforming application source code into versioned packages deployable to any environment. It contains one or more steps where source code is turned into a build that is tested and deployed across different environments until it eventually reaches the end user in production. 

Types of CI/CD Pipeline Patterns

A CI/CD pipeline is a runnable specification of the steps which a developer needs to perform while delivering a new version of a software product. Without an automated pipeline, engineers would still need to perform these steps manually and less productively.

The goal of a successful continuous delivery process is to minimize the time to bring high-quality software into reality by practicing agile techniques and automating the entire delivery system. Moreover, the strategy and structure of pipelines are driven mainly by a proper structure and pattern. Therefore, pipelines need to be deployment-centric, as a typical trigger would be a deployable artifact. 

Here are the 7 major types of CI/CD pipeline patterns:

1. Build and Deploy Model

This model mainly focuses on building the prototype first and deploying it later. One of the benefits of this pattern is that you can deploy this artifact multiple times after building it once. 

The build and deploy model is environmentally agnostic, which means it doesn’t require any external environment-oriented properties or packages. In addition to this, this model packages everything together, including the core infrastructure code. 

2. Pipelines as a Code

Pipeline logic is codified, stored alongside infrastructure code, and utilizes containerized runners in this pattern. It is managed like a normal app code and subjected to similar review processes and branching strategies. Other than that, the execution of pipelines on containers facilitates your CI/CD platform to support numerous workloads, although every workload contains its specific build environment to fulfill its requirements.

For build environments, container image provenance employs trustworthy Docker images. The implementation of the CI runner is automated, uniform, and hands-free. Furthermore, it can grow to match demand and be on standby during core hours. Subsequently, it can minimize unnecessary delays. Also, the secrets are kept outside the pipeline, and their output is concealed, resulting in enhanced security. 

3. Faster Team Feedback

Every commit automatically triggers the proper pipeline, with build pipelines especially optimized for faster reporting of any issues. Here, they build pipelines using parallelization for non-interdependent jobs to increase speed. Moreover, quick-build pipelines exclusively run the crucial jobs in minimal time.

Other than that, every successful run produces static analysis results and a versioned package in this pattern. You can even enable team notifications on pull request status in emails, chat channels, dashboards, and other mediums. 

4. Test Automation Pattern

Automating the build is the core practice in the CI pipeline. Furthermore, the build process can use the build tool for a specific codebase. For example, you can use npm to build your node Javascript apps; JVM-based solutions.  

Besides, modern test frameworks can mimic app development with orchestration packages that need to be deployed within the app. Also, modifying test coverage to cover API changes is an exception with automated tests. Thus, a pipeline exclusively dedicated to testing automation can be the best choice.  

5. Stable Internal Releases 

In this pattern, each code branch gets a total ephemeral environment for each branch that can be created and destroyed with ease. Here the build produces versioned packages that are deployed and triggered by automated or manual events. 

Furthermore, every software engineer can delete or trigger ephemeral environments at any time. CI runners use cloud-native capabilities to assume roles and get the right permissions for project completion.

6. Designing Parallel Workflows

It is common for development teams to practice continuous integration in small chunks of code before creating an app. Here it is customary to set up a linear flow. The whole thing might run end to end within no time. 

One of the common mistakes here is applying similar linear thinking while graduating from Continuous Integration to Continuous Delivery. So, if you’re doing things in parallel, your Continuous Delivery system must be innovative about handling dependencies.

7. Buttoned-Up Product Releases

You need to integrate tagged releases into production and automate the overall paperwork. Moreover, codified release gates and standardized release processes facilitate release on demand.

Automated releases leave a transparent paper trail that is auditable for quality and governance. In addition to this, release gates can invoke external APIs and use the responses to decide whether to proceed with the existing release or stop the process.

Conclusion

For modern digital products and services, faster release with enhanced safety is a core competitive business advantage. CI CD pipelines enable your organization to make giant leaps forward in speed and stability. Also, it establishes an automated enterprise governance process. Moreover, a CI CD pipeline ensures that your organization actively understands and manages risk. So, optimize your CI/CD pipeline to make the most of your software development. 

This post discussed patterns to build robust and capable CI/CD pipelines that will help you automate other relevant software development and delivery workflows. This automation will pay you back in terms of rapid feedback, improved quality, and increased flow.