Exploring Best Practices and Modern Trends in CI/CD

Let’s start with statistics: continuous integration, deployment, and delivery are among the top IT investment priorities in 2024 and 2025. To be exact, according to GitLab’s 2024 Global DevSecOps report, it is in 8th place (and security is the top priority!). However, it shouldn’t be surprising, as CI/CD practice brings a lot of benefits to IT teams — it helps to accelerate software delivery and detect vulnerabilities and bugs earlier.

In this blog post, we focus on CI/CD best practices and modern trends. But first, let's remember what continuous integration and continuous delivery are.

What CI/CD Actually Is 

First of all, let’s agree that automation is one of the fundamentals of successful DevOps. One way to achieve this is by implementing CI/CD pipelines that meet the demands of modern software development. 

On a side note, many organizations that switched to DevOps had a breakthrough in terms of bridging the gap between development and operations. Now, since CI/CD is a key part of DevOps, let’s break it down!

Build Each Package Only Once

A core principle is to build deployment artifacts once and then promote that same package through all stages of the pipeline, from testing to staging and production. This ensures the code being tested is exactly the same as the code being deployed, eliminating inconsistencies between environments.

Continuous Integration: Keynote

By continuous integration, we mean the process of frequently and automatically integrating code changes into a shared source-code repo. In order to achieve successful CI, after merging the changes made to the application by the developer, they must be validated. That is done by automatically building the application and running a range of different automated tests. 

Usual testing includes unit and integration testing, as they guarantee that these new changes do not break the application. This way, testing is comprehensive as the approach not only covers the small individual functions and classes but also different modules that make up the whole app. The key benefit of this process is seeing if there is a conflict between old and new code very quickly and then simply resolving any bugs and errors frequently while saving time. 

Continuous Delivery and Deployment: Let’s Break It Down

On the other hand, continuous delivery is all about automatically delivering completed code to testing and development environments, among others. This way, the process is automated as well as consistent for the code to be moved to the aforementioned environments. Then, we have continuous deployment. The changes that pass the testing phase will be automatically delivered to production, which then results in many production deployments.

According to Google Cloud and DORA’s 2023 State of DevOps Report, faster code reviews (a crucial component of CI/CD) tend to have a 50% greater software delivery performance. Moreover, organizations can further boost their processes by employing a public cloud. It helps to improve infrastructure flexibility and, as the report states, leads to a 22% increase in infrastructure flexibility and, therefore, improved organizational performance by 30% when compared to less flexible infrastructures. 

To put it simply, continuous integration is everything that happens before the code is completed, and continuous development and deployment are the practices after the code has already been completed.

How CI/CD Benefits Software Development 

When it comes to software development, proper CI/CD gives a number of advantages. These include the ability to easily merge code changes, detect bugs earlier, and reduce errors, as well as quicker and more secure deployment.

Now, let’s look at the main advantages of continuous integration and continuous delivery for dev teams, organizations, and customers: 

• Increased developer productivity – CI/CD automates repetitive tasks such as testing, development, and deployment, allowing developers more time for their primary objectives. 
• Quicker deployment and faster time-to-market – frequent testing leads to earlier bug detection and earlier fixes; therefore, since the time required for this is decreased, time-to-market is decreased too. 
• Better quality of software – thanks to the incremental approaches in development, you can find errors earlier. To simplify: deploy a partial build, test it, and integrate it into the iteration for continuous improvement of the quality of the software.
• Reliable code management – by using a version control system like Git, all code, tests, and configurations are tracked, enabling reliable collaboration and change management.

CI/CD Trends and Best Practices

Well, finally, let’s get closer to the topic:

No. 1: Early and Frequent Commits 

When making changes to code, commit them to the version control system as soon as possible. By committing earlier, developers get instant feedback thanks to the automated tests and/or team members; therefore, issues get fixed earlier! 

Another thing is the reduction of potentially large bugs coming up. To avoid that, it is important to make small and incremental changes as they are more understandable as well as easier to review and test. When using this approach, make sure that the project is continuously progressing and the source code is working properly. 

Here’s how to optimize and improve the approach mentioned above:

• First of all, go for a trunk-based development model because changes can be quickly committed to a centralized master branch. This simplifies the deployment to production and minimizes any potential difficulties linked to merging changes. As the DORA and Google report outlines, trunk-based development is expected to improve organizational performance by 12.8 times when it is supported by clear and detailed documentation, as opposed to cases with poorer quality of documentation. 
• Then, if teams are to perform well, encourage them to commit daily by using available automation in order to guarantee regular and high-quality releases. Now, daily commits will improve the communication across the DevOps teams, which in turn will result in coordinating efforts and speeding up feature integration into production. This technique can lower the rate of mistakes being made and support continuous supply, and therefore increase total efficiency. 
• Finally, for successful CI/CD processes, facilitate collaboration from a variety of areas. This can include: developers, infrastructure engineers, security specialists, and operations teams. Effective coordination supports the CI/CD and enables individuals to deliver best-quality software. 

No. 2: Prioritize Security

Build process needs protection! Due to the fast-paced nature of the CI/CD strategy, security is rather important here. Therefore, it is significant to adopt the security-first approach right from the beginning and set out what the security requirements are. Once that mindset is locked in, needs are clearly defined, and the production environment is thoroughly analyzed for potential vulnerabilities. Thus, you can introduce appropriate security measures.

Don’t forget to separate CI/CD systems from other parts of the internal network, in order to guarantee they are being stored securely. Some of the things to implement would be: multi-factor authentication (MFA), VPNs, secure backups and Disaster Recovery techniques, firewalls, and strict access controls. Think of this as building a stronghold for the source code and having defence mechanisms in place in order to protect what is being built, before even starting the construction process. 

Other things to consider in terms of prioritizing security and DevSecOps: 

• The principle of least privilege 
• Infrastructure as Code (IaC) – use IaC tools to manage and secure the infrastructure in a repeatable, automated way
• Encryption (both in transit and at rest) 
• Proper error handling mechanisms 
• Input validation and output encoding – to prevent common attacks such as SQL injection or cross-site scripting
• Penetration testing 

No. 3: Test Earlier in CI/CD Pipeline

Ideally, in terms of testing, it is best to detect and fix issues early in order to simplify the development process and improve the software quality. Run tests at each stage of the development process, but remember to fix issues in a separate pre-production environment, or if not, at least test code locally before merging it with the shared repo. 

Therefore, to avoid spending significant amounts of time on testing code’s quality after it has been deployed (e.g., make new features instead) and to prevent bugs in the pipeline, test early and consistently. 

In addition, this process of testing involves a range of tests to guarantee complete coverage:

• Unit testing
• Integration or component tests
• Functional tests
• GUI testing
• Performance and load tests
• Security testing
• Acceptance tests

Create Test Environments on Demand

Instead of using static, long-lived testing environments, adopt the practice of creating ephemeral, scripted environments as needed for each test run. This isolates tests, prevents configuration drift, and ensures a clean, consistent environment for every code change.

No. 4: Use DevOps Tools for Better CI/CD 

Don’t forget about DevOps tools that automate and simplify different elements in the CI/CD pipeline. They are usually provided in the form of an application or as features. The main purpose of these tools is to automate manual operations, which will save time and effort during integration, testing, and deployment of the code. 

Since there are lots of DevOps CI/CD tools available, some might find it difficult to choose tools that are the best option for them to meet the needs of their  organization. Before making a decision, first examine the requirements and the capabilities along with the features of each tool. This may sound ambiguous, but it is important to choose the tools that align with the set-out priorities and objectives. Some of the key factors to take into account would be: supported programming languages and platforms, functionality, user-friendliness, scalability, and budget. 

No. 5: Automate the DevOps Processes  

There is a range of processes that could and should be automated, for example, automated testing. To start off, create a thorough list of testing duties with a concentration on those that require no human interaction. Prioritize automating complex tests, since they have the greatest influence on pipeline efficiency. 

Now, in terms of automating the tests in the CI/CD pipeline, we will outline two options. The first one is bots, which are specialized tools, designed for specific tests, like web or API testing.

The second option is wrappers. With this one comes greater control over testing processes, but at the cost of needing additional setup.

Teams could create customized tests for the CI/CD pipeline by clearly specifying the steps of testing and then sequencing them. 

No. 6: Adopt a Microservices Architecture 

The microservices architecture is the way to design software where the application is divided into smaller elements called microservices. Each component can function, be updated, and scaled independently.

No. 7: Monitoring the Pipeline

To improve the CI/CD processes, monitor and review pipelines regularly. Daily reviews may seem like a drag; however, over time, the number of changes, tests, bugs, and fixes piles up. So, regular checks will guarantee informative insight into how the pipeline is performing. This way, for example, individuals can pinpoint what the most frequent cause of errors actually is. That’s a crucial functionality, allowing for the implementation of changes in order to prevent the potential risks. 

There are monitoring tools out there to help with the process. By integrating them into the workflow, devs will get more detailed information regarding the fundamental causes of errors along with recurring failure patterns. And it will allow the development team to deal with them quickly. 

No. 8: Optimize the Pipeline Stages for Speed

Break down the CI/CD pipeline into smaller, independent stages that can run in parallel. This speeds up feedback loops. Implement a “fail fast” approach, where faster tests like unit and security scans run early in the pipeline to catch issues immediately, preventing wasted time on longer builds that are destined to fail.

No. 9: Adopt Backup and DR Practices

At the beginning of this blog post, we said that security is a top priority in IT. Thus, it’s important to make sure that the source code is safe in any event of disaster. One of the best ways to do that is DevOps Backup with Disaster Recovery technology. While building the backup strategy, make sure that backup follows the backup best practices, including the possibility to keep backups in multiple storage locations and follow the 3-2-1 backup rule, backup automation, easy monitoring of backups and management, in-flight and at-rest encryption with its own encryption key, and different restore capabilities to address any event of failure.

Conclusion

To sum up, CI/CD processes are an essential element in modern-day software development. Thanks to the automation it brings in, you can speed up production processes, be sure that all potential issues are resolved in a timely manner, and deploy frequently.

Due to the digitized world that we live in, we must pay attention to how  CI/CD pipelines are managed, stay up-to-date regarding current modern trends, and pay attention to security as well as any arising cyberthreats.