Why You Need Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment

Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment are already ruling the software industry. Since the objective of every software organization is to bring their product and features to the market as soon as possible, it’s very important to automate most of the tasks to enable the frictionless delivery.

Why Do You Need Continuous Integration?

Have you been in a situation where multiple code changes have been committed to your application and something then breaks? How do you find out which change caused the problem? Usually, this scenario leads to multiple exchanges, with the bug being passed from developer to developer trying to detect where the bug was introduced.

Distributed version control systems like Git, while offering many other benefits, have exacerbated the problem by allowing developers to make changes independently to the same pieces of code. The result? Repeated instances of integration hell.

The most effective way to solve this problem is to catch these bugs as soon as they are introduced. This approach improves software quality without slowing down releases. Continuous Integration is a development best practice in which every code commit is immediately integrated into a shared repository and is automatically built and tested. The developer making the code change gets immediate feedback and can fix bugs easily if required since every bug can be tracked down to a commit.

The cost and effort required to fix a bug increase exponentially if found in later stages of the SDLC, while also increasing risk. With Continuous Integration, you find the bug as soon as it is introduced, leading to shipping releases faster and with better quality. Continuous Integration will help you:

• Find bugs sooner.

• Accelerate releases.

• Eliminate manual handoffs and ensure that your releases are frequent.

Why Do You Need Continuous Deployment?

Are you happy with how quickly your new products and features can be released to customers? If you're like most businesses, the answer is likely no. The main reason for it is the friction that exists in your software delivery process.

In most organizations, the friction is because deployments to different environments are manual and require some team to provision/update the environment as needed, deploy a specific version of the software, and keep track of what is running where. This manual process creates a dependency on people being available to work on this at all times and on them never making mistakes. Teams also struggle with a lack of visibility about what version of the application is running in each environment, making testing, bug fixing, and release management more challenging.

This process is repeated every time you want to update production and is error-prone, wasteful, and adds no value to your customers. Ultimately, these inefficiencies will lead to slower releases and lost revenue and opportunities.

The best way to achieve the pace you need is to automate all steps in the deployment pipeline. This leads to rapid releases that are predictable, error-free, and lead to happy and productive engineering teams. Continuous deployment will help you:

• Create versioned manifests.

• Promote manifests across environments.

• Flexible deployments to any cloud.

Both CI and CD are the building blocks of your software development process. Applying them thoughtfully can help streamline your software delivery.