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What is CI and CD?
Understanding Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery
Today’s Insights: 👈️
What is CI and CD?
What is Continuous Integration (CI)?
What is Continuous Delivery / Deployment (CD)?
Industry Example from Coinbase.com
What is Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery (CD)?
Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) are practices in software development where code changes are automatically prepared and tested to be released into production, facilitating frequent updates and ensuring high-quality software. Here are some key benefits of implementing Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) in your development process:
Incremental Code Integration: CI/CD promotes the integration of small, manageable code segments, making them simpler to manage and troubleshoot. This approach is particularly effective for large teams, enhancing communication and prompt problem identification.
Isolation of Defects: By employing CI/CD, faults within the system can be isolated more effectively, reducing their impact and easing maintenance efforts. Quick identification and localization of issues prevent extensive damage and streamline repairs.
Accelerated Release Cycles: The CI/CD model supports faster release frequencies by enabling continuous merging and deployment of code changes. This ensures that the software remains in a release-ready state, allowing for rapid adaptation to market needs.
Reduced Backlog: Implementing CI/CD reduces the backlog by catching and fixing non-critical defects early in the development cycle. This allows teams to concentrate on more significant issues or enhancements, thereby improving overall product quality.
Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery (CD)
What is Continuous Integration (CI)?
Continuous Integration (CI) is a software development practice where developers regularly merge their code changes into a central repository, after which automated builds and tests are run. The primary goal of CI is to find and address bugs quicker, improve software quality, and reduce the time it takes to validate and release new software updates.
What are the benefits of Continuous Integration?
The advantages of CI include improved developer productivity and efficiency, as integration problems are detected and solved early. CI encourages smaller code changes more frequently, which minimizes the risk of disrupting the main branch. This process enhances the code quality and reduces the debugging time, as issues are identified and addressed almost as soon as they are introduced. Additionally, CI enables faster release cycles by allowing teams to integrate their work anytime through automated processes, thereby supporting agile practices.
Key Benefits:
Improved developer productivity and efficiency.
Frequent, smaller code changes.
Enhanced code quality.
Faster release cycles.
Supports agile practices.
What are the risks of Continuous Integration?
However, there are also disadvantages and risks associated with CI. The initial setup of CI can be complex and resource-intensive, requiring significant effort to write effective tests and configure the CI pipeline properly. If not implemented carefully, CI can lead to frequent build failures, which may disrupt the development workflow and decrease team morale. Moreover, over-reliance on automated testing might lead to neglect of manual testing, potentially missing out on user experience or complex interaction issues not covered by tests. Lastly, maintaining a CI system requires continuous oversight and updates to test scripts and infrastructure, which can become a burden.
Key Risks:
Complex initial setup.
Risk of frequent build failures.
Potential neglect of manual testing.
Need for continuous maintenance and updates.
What is Continuous Delivery/Deployment?
Continuous Delivery (CD) refers to the software development method where code changes are automatically built, tested, and prepared for a release to production, with the goal of making releases as quick and efficient as possible. Continuous Deployment extends this concept by automatically releasing the changes to the production environment whenever they pass the necessary automated tests. The core principle of both practices is the ability to deploy software at any moment, with high assurance of stability and reliability due to automated delivery processes.
What are the benefits of Continuous Delivery / Deployment?
Advantages of Continuous Delivery and Deployment are reduced deployment risk, as frequent, smaller updates are less likely to cause major disruptions. This method supports a faster time to market, as the ability to deploy immediately after passing build and test stages greatly shortens the release cycle. Furthermore, the integration of testing and deployment automation helps in swiftly identifying and rectifying issues, which enhances the overall quality of the software. From a customer perspective, the quick iteration of product updates in response to feedback ensures that the product continuously evolves in line with user demands, thus boosting customer satisfaction.
Key Benefits:
Reduced deployment risk from smaller, frequent updates.
Faster market delivery by deploying immediately after testing.
Improved software quality through automated testing.
Increased customer satisfaction with rapid updates.
What are the risks of Continuous Delivery / Deployment?
However, the disadvantages include the high initial costs associated with setting up the necessary automation tools and processes. Managing the complexity of multiple environments and deployment pipelines presents significant challenges. The frequency of deployments necessitates robust monitoring systems to quickly resolve any issues that occur post-release. Additionally, the ease of making frequent updates can lead to user overload if not strategically managed, as constant changes may disrupt user experience.
Key Risk:
High initial setup costs for automation tools and processes.
Challenges in managing complex environments and pipelines.
Need for robust monitoring systems due to frequent deployments.
Risk of user overload from too many updates.
Summary of Continuous Integration (CI) and
Continuous Delivery (CD)
Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery (CD) streamline software development by frequently integrating and automatically deploying code changes. CI focuses on early bug detection and resolution, enhancing software quality and speeding up release cycles. CD extends CI’s capabilities, ensuring software can be deployed immediately after passing automated tests. Together, they minimize deployment risks, improve operational efficiency, and enable rapid market adaptation. Main challenges include the initial setup cost and complexity of managing automated systems and monitoring.
Industry Example from Coinbase.com
Mingshi Wang, a Staff Software Engineer at Coinbase, among others, describes how Coinbase used the Databricks platform to build their CI and CD system and streamline application development and deployment.
As Coinbase onboarded more applications to Databricks, they saw the need for a managed approach to reliably build and release them. They developed a robust CI and CD platform that streamlines the orchestration of source code, empowering users to release compute tasks easily while avoiding the complexities of the system. This integration allowed Coinbase to create a seamless deployment system that efficiently handles both batch and streaming data jobs.
With this setup, developers can easily configure their applications through simple YAML files, and the CI and CD system ensures consistent deployment by managing all artifacts and tracking job versions. The combination of monitoring, orchestration workflows, and distributed locking provides a smooth development experience, allowing engineers to focus on building their applications without being bogged down by the complexities of deployment logistics.
Monitoring: The monitoring system continuously checks the health and status of all jobs. It gathers metrics like the success and failure rates of builds, submission reliability, and the health of individual jobs. Alerts via Slack or PagerDuty ensure that developers are informed immediately if any job encounters issues.
Orchestration Workflows: These workflows automate the entire CI and CD cycle from building and testing to deploying and monitoring jobs. They handle job submissions through well-structured API layers and coordinate the entire deployment process. This automation ensures consistency and reduces manual intervention, making the overall workflow smoother.
Distributed Locking: This mechanism prevents data corruption by allowing only one job version to write outputs at a time. The new version catches up with the old one through checkpoint data and only gets control when it's ready. This ensures that the switch to the new version doesn't disrupt streaming or batch processing.