DevOps is the combination of two areas of information technology: Development and Operations. DevOps engineers work very closely with software developers and operation engineers to fully automate the creation and configuration of the cloud infrastructure and the build, testing and deployment of the applications. The best DevOps engineers come from software development and have a good understanding of operating systems, networking and data storage technologies.
CI/CD Pipelines
There are multiple interpretations of the origin of the acronym. The one I prefer explains CI/CD (Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment), together Continuous Delivery pipelines, as the building, testing, deployment and configuration of applications. It can operate on-premises and cloud environments.
Continuous Integration (CI)
Continuous Integration automates the
- Building
- Testing
of the software. This allows developers to frequently merge code changes into the central repository to build and test the result of small updates. It is much easier to found and correct an error in a small change, than in a large, significant modification. This provides frequent feedback of on the quality of the code and allows stakeholders to follow the development process.
Continuous Deployment (CD)
The goal is to ensure the rapid and reliable release and deployment of the software to production. Automates the
- Configuration
- Deployment
of the application. Usually every merged change is automatically deployed to the Development environment, so it is available for human testing any time. The deployment to higher environments (QA, UAT, Production) can be automatic or manual.
