CI/CD explained: What is it & why do we need it?

CI/CD explained

CI/CD falls under DevOps (the joining of development and operations) and combines the practices of continuous integration and continuous delivery. CI/CD automates much or all of the manual human intervention traditionally needed to get new code from a commit into production such as build, test, and deploy, as well as infrastructure provisioning. With a CI/CD pipeline, developers can make changes to code that are then automatically tested and pushed out for delivery and deployment. Get CI/CD right and downtime is minimized and code releases happen faster.

What is continuous integration (CI)?

Continuous integration is the practice of integrating all your code changes into the main branch of a shared source code repository early and often, automatically testing each change when you commit or merge them, and automatically kicking off a build. With continuous integration, errors and security issues can be identified and fixed more easily, and much earlier in the software development life-cycle.

By merging changes frequently and triggering automatic testing and validation…