What is CI/CD: Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery Explained

CI/CD, which stands for continuous integration and continuous delivery (or deployment), is a crucial component of the DevOps process, aimed at automating and streamlining software development and deployment. Continuous integration involves automatically integrating code contributions into a shared repository, followed by automated testing to reveal issues early in the development cycle. Continuous delivery builds upon this by automatically delivering validated builds to testing environments and preparing them for manual deployment. In contrast, continuous deployment further automates the process by automatically deploying validated changes into production without manual intervention. The primary distinction between continuous delivery and continuous deployment lies in the level of automation, with continuous deployment eliminating manual steps to enhance efficiency. Together, CI/CD/CD enables agile and frequent software updates, allowing organizations to introduce new features and bug fixes as they are ready, rather than adhering to traditional release cycles. This methodology results in quicker updates and improved responsiveness to user needs, making it a key practice in mature DevOps environments.