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CI/CD & Automation: The Pipeline

Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery/Deployment (CD) are the core practices that automate code testing, building, and release, making development faster and more reliable.

Continuous Integration (CI)

CI is a development practice where developers merge their code changes into a central repository (like GitHub) frequently—often several times a day. When code is merged, an automated build process runs immediately.

The CI Process

Commit: A developer pushes code changes.
Build: Automated software compiles the code and runs unit tests.
Test: If all tests pass, the change is merged. If tests fail, the team is alerted immediately to fix the issue ("fail fast").

Continuous Delivery and Deployment (CD)

CD extends CI by automating the release process. This ensures that every successful build can be released to users quickly and safely.

Continuous Delivery means code is ready to be deployed at any time, often requiring a manual button push to go live. Continuous Deployment takes it a step further: every successful change is automatically released to production without human intervention.

Why Automate?

Automation is the cornerstone of DevOps because it:

Reduces Risk: Issues are found and fixed earlier when code changes are small.
Increases Speed: Code moves from the developer's machine to the user faster.
Improves Quality: Standardized, automated tests prevent human error.

Common CI/CD Tools

Specialized tools manage the automated pipeline, linking source code to testing environments and production servers:

GitHub Actions / GitLab CI: Built-in tools for running pipelines directly from the code repository.
Jenkins: An open-source, powerful automation server used for complex, custom pipelines.

Automation is powerful, but how do we ensure the environment is always consistent?

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