What is CI/CD?

CI/CD is the workflow process for automation development and deployment that developers should know about to improve their skills.

CI is the workflow process for automating the process of building and testing code whenever a team member commits changes to Git, which is a form of version control that’s run on a source control repository platform such as Azure Repos, GitHub, GitLab, and others. CI creates a modern culture for all developers to share their code, including unit tests, by merging all changes into a shared version control repository after finishing a small task. CI runs based on committing code triggers to grab the latest code from the shared version control repository to build, test, and validate any branch that they commit. Using CI allows you to rapidly discover error code issues and correct them to ensure all developer code is of good quality.

CD involves automating the process of building, testing, configuring, and deploying from the CI workflow process to specific environments, such as QA, staging, and production.

This workflow is illustrated in the following figure:

Figure 1.1 – CI/CD diagram

CI/CD reduces human error and the routine operation of the manual build, test, and deploy stages for any developer. It helps the developer focus only on application development.

This book will focus on the CI/CD tool Azure Pipelines, which is a comprehensive service for DevOps and a part of the ecosystem of services in Azure DevOps. Before we look at this further, let’s introduce Azure DevOps.