Maximizing Software Development Efficiency: How CI/CD Affects DevOps Culture

While continuous integration and continuous delivery can be described as two separate pipelines, it’s important to remember that they are principles that can be implemented with many tools. For example, A CI/CD pipeline can be built on a single platform, such as GitLab, that facilitates version control collaboration and allows integration of Kubernetes and Docker in one location.  While other tools like GitHub and Jenkins solely provide continuous integration and continuous delivery, respectively. Cloud platforms often provide automation tools like CloudFormation and AWS TaskCat for facilitating continuous delivery of infrastructure as opposed to software applications in a CI/CD pipeline, as we are discussing here. While we are discussing a software life cycle when addressing a CI/CD pipeline, it’s important to recognize similar principles exist in other places.

Continuous integration allows an organization to employ multiple software engineers to build and test software together as a team. Version control software, such as git, assists software engineers in code collaboration. Collaboration during testing ensures quality code and allows cod updates to reach applications quickly and efficiently. A possible drawback would be that continuous integration does introduce a need for more management. While teams are more productive and efficient, organizations require DevOps engineers to manage their pipelines.

Continuous delivery allows organizations to efficiently deploy applications to production, development, and test servers. By automating the process of delivery using tools like Jenkins, organizations can take integrated code and push it to servers. It allows organizations to more quickly introduce and test code and infrastructure changes.