CI/CD Services – Integrate and Automate DevOps

DevOps culture has gained rapid momentum in the digital world as it enables organizations to adopt agile software delivery methodologies like Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery (CD).

These methodologies enable instant feedback loops, faster issue resolution, improved software quality, and cost reductions, all while meeting the ever-increasing demand to deliver better software faster. Thus, CI/CD practices have become the de-facto software delivery standards across the IT industry.

CI/CD introduces continuous automation and continuous monitoring throughout the lifecycle of software delivery, from build, integration, and testing to delivery and deployment.

Together, these methodologies are often referred to as a CI/CD pipeline.

Introduction: CI and CD

• Continuous Integration (CI)

Continuous Integration (CI) is the practice of continually merging code changes from all developers into a shared repository, after which automated builds and tests are carried out.

It enables developers to integrate code into a shared repository frequently, preferably several times a day. Each integration is then checked by an automated build and automated tests.

The key benefits of CI are that you can identify and fix bugs quicker, enhance software quality, and reduce the time to validate and release new software updates.

• Continuous Delivery (CD)

Continuous Delivery (CD) is a software development practice where code changes are automatically built, tested, configured, and prepared for a release to production. It expands upon CI by deploying all code changes to the testing and production environments after the build stage.

With continuous delivery, developers can automate testing beyond just unit tests and verify code updates across multiple dimensions before deploying to customers. Thus, developers can validate updates more thoroughly and discover issues pre-emptively.

• Continuous Deployment – The Other CD

The prime difference between continuous delivery and continuous deployment is the need for manual approval to update to production. Continuous deployment involves automated deployment of the software artifact to the production environment without explicit approval.

Veritis CI/CD Service Offerings

We offer end-to-end DevOps CI/CD services to enable developers and IT operations teams to rapidly and securely deliver software.

Our CI/CD service offerings (as a service) help you securely store and apply version control to your application’s source code.

CI/CD Design Services

• Tooling definition and selection
• CI/CD strategy and roadmap designing

CI/CD Implementation Services

• Current infrastructure analysis
• Addressing bottlenecks
• Tech stack selection
• End-to-end CI/CD implementation
• Maintenance and optimization

CI/CD Consulting Services

• CI/CD pipelines auditing
• Consulting and control of the execution

Our CI/CD Solutions

With a slew of CI/CD tools available in the market, it can be challenging for the Dev and Ops teams to pick out the right tools.

Here are some of the best CI/CD tools, along with their key features, to make the selection process easier for your team.

Best CI/CD Tools

Some other important CI/CD tools available in the market are:

• Travis CI
• Codefresh
• AWS CodeBuild
• Argo
• Spinnaker
• Flux
• JetBrains

CI/CD Implementation

To harness the full potential of the modern DevOps environment, organizations must embark on a scalable CI/CD DevOps implementation. It lays a strong foundation for enabling an agile DevOps for your business.

Here are the four different stages of CI/CD implementation:

Commit

• In this stage, new features and new codes are integrated with the base
• Checking code quality using the feedback system
• Performing a series of unit tests and sanity tests with CI/CD tools
• For example, Jenkins helps automate complete software development lifecycle

Build

• The second stage is built once the code is tested and integrated
• In this stage, developers push the artifacts into the registry
• For example, the Docker tool is used to build servers and deploy the artifacts into the registry so they can be ready for testing

Test

• In the testing stage, alpha and beta deployments will take place
• At the alpha deployment stage, developers check the performance of their new builds and the interactions between the builds
• Beta deployment is where manual testing takes place to double-check the application before pushing it to production

Production Deployment

• This is the fourth and final stage where the application goes live
• Once the build passes through all the testing phases successfully, it is ready to be deployed to the production stage for the end-user environment

Business Benefits of CI/CD

The CI/CD methodology broadly offers the following benefits to businesses:

1) Efficient Software Delivery

With continuous delivery, your team can automatically build, test, and prepare code changes for release to production, enabling a more efficient and rapid software delivery.

2) Improved Team Productivity

CI/CD practices improve your team’s productivity by freeing developers from manual tasks, reducing the number of errors and bugs deployed to customers.

3) Identify and Fix Bugs Quicker

With CI/CD, your team can perform more frequent and comprehensive testing and quickly identify and address bugs earlier. Continuous delivery enables you efficiently perform additional types of code tests. The discipline of ‘more tests more frequently’ enables teams to deliver quality code with a high assurance of stability and security.

4) Deliver Updates Faster

Continuous delivery enables faster and frequent delivery of updates to customers. When implemented properly, continuous delivery will help you always have a deployment-ready build artifact that has passed through a standardized test process.

5) Greater Collaboration

CI/CD promotes closer team communication by enabling development, operational, management, and QA teams to collaborate on technologies, practices, and priorities.

6) Improved MTTR

Smaller code changes and quick fault isolation enabled by CI/CD practices reduce the Mean Time To Resolution (MTTR). CI/CD plays a vital role in keeping failures to a bare minimum and quickly recovering from any failures that do happen.

7) Reduced Costs

Automation in the CI/CD pipeline minimizes the number of errors that can occur in the many repetitive steps of CI and CD. It also frees up developers’ time that could be spent on product development as there won’t be many code changes to fix since the errors are identified quickly.

Moreover, increasing code quality with CI/CD also increases your ROI.

Veritis as Your Reliable Partner for CI/CD Services

Veritis is a reliable Managed IT Services provider with over a decade of industry presence in delivering end-to-end DevOps services and enabling CI/CD for our customers.

We can help you automate the way you build, test, and deploy your applications and ensure cost-efficient and secure software delivery.

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