Why it matters
Continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) appears in more Ghanaian DevOps adverts than any skill except the cloud itself, under tool names such as GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Jenkins and Azure DevOps. A pipeline is a robot teammate that checks every change the same way, every time, and never gets tired at 11 at night.
The idea
- Continuous integration (CI): every push is automatically built and tested, so mistakes are caught within minutes, while the change is fresh in the author's mind.
- Continuous delivery: every change that passes is packaged and ready to release with one approval.
- Continuous deployment: every passing change goes to users automatically, with no human step.
Most teams start with CI, then add delivery to a test environment, and only later deploy to production automatically.
Parts of a pipeline
- Trigger: what starts it, such as a push or pull request.
- Runner: the machine that runs the work, usually a fresh Linux VM.
- Jobs and steps: the commands, such as install, test, build.
- Artifacts: the outputs, such as a container image or a zip file.