CI/CD Pipelines: Automating Build and Deployment
Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Deployment/Delivery (CD) automate the process of taking code from a developer's machine to production — through building, testing, security scanning, and deployment. CI/CD is a foundational engineering practice that improves quality, reduces risk, and accelerates delivery.
Continuous Integration (CI)
CI automatically builds and tests code every time it is pushed to the repository. Every pull request triggers: compilation/build, unit tests, integration tests, static analysis, security scanning (SAST, dependency scanning, secret scanning), code quality checks. Developers receive immediate feedback — problems are caught before they are merged.
Continuous Deployment / Delivery
CD automatically deploys code that passes CI to one or more environments. There are two variants:
- Continuous Delivery: Code is automatically deployed to staging and made ready for production deployment — but production deployment requires a manual approval
- Continuous Deployment: Code is automatically deployed all the way to production when CI passes — no manual intervention. Requires high confidence in the test suite and monitoring.
Pipeline Stages
A typical CI/CD pipeline: Code push → Build → Unit tests → Integration tests → Security scan → Container image build → Image scan → Deploy to staging → Smoke tests → Deploy to production → Health check → Notify.
Tools We Use
- GitHub Actions: Native CI/CD in GitHub — excellent developer experience, flexible, integrated with GitHub Security features
- CircleCI, GitLab CI: Alternatives with strong pipeline capabilities
- ArgoCD: GitOps-based deployment for Kubernetes — declarative, auditable