Defining Continuous Integration, Continuous Delivery, and Continuous Deployment.
CI/CD is a cornerstone of modern DevOps practices, designed to automate the software development and release process. Continuous Integration (CI) is the practice of developers frequently merging their code changes into a central repository, after which automated builds and tests are run. This frequent integration helps to detect and locate errors quickly. The primary goal of CI is to ensure that new code doesn't break the existing build. Continuous Delivery (CD) is the next logical step, where code changes are automatically built, tested, and prepared for a release to production. It expands upon CI by automating the release process, ensuring that you can decide to release new changes to your customers quickly and sustainably. The final stage is Continuous Deployment, which takes automation one step further. With this practice, every change that passes all stages of your production pipeline is released to your customers. There’s no human intervention, and only a failed test will prevent a new change from being deployed to production. This approach accelerates the feedback loop with your customers and allows developers to focus on building software.