In application development, we will be having various different stages to finish the end goal. CI/CD is a method to automate this stages of application development and delivery.
Let's assume that a group of developers working on a single project. All of them have their development code version controlled locally in their systems using VCS tools like GIT. The below architecture will helps you to clearly understand the process lifecycle.
Each developer will work on their individual tasks and once they are finished it will be going to pushed to a distributed version control systems like GitHub, GitLab etc. From here the build pipeline will pull the code from this remote repository and starts building the application. If build process gets failed due to any of the reasons like runtime errors etc the code will be get pulled by the developer and rework on the issue. If issue gets resolved this code will be again pushed to the distributed version control unit. If build process gets success then it move into the next stage for testing which is called as CT (Continuous testing). Test engineers will check the code and if there are no issues or bugs it will be passed to the next stage for deployment. Else, the code is again pulled back by the developers to resolve the bugs identified by the testing team.
Continuous Developement + Continuous Building + Continuous Testing = Continuous Integartion
Once integration is successful, then it is going to be deployed into production environments which is known as continuous deployment. As there would be no manual intervention during the lifecycle it is called as continuous deployment. If there is any authorization access needed before it gets deployed into production environments, then it is known as continuous delivery (CD) .
Whenever some changes take place in development, the system will automatically recognize the changes and trigger complete stages automatically. This methodology is one of the hot topic in the current market. As it helps to deliver the apps to customers quickly and accurately with less time.
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