What is CI/CD?

CI/CD stands for Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery or Continuous Deployment. It is a method used in software development to automate the process of integrating code changes from multiple contributors into a single software project, and then delivering or deploying this code to production environments in a streamlined and efficient manner.

– Continuous Integration (CI): This part focuses on the integration process. Whenever developers commit changes to the version control repository (e.g., Git), an automated process builds and tests the code to ensure that these new changes integrate well with the existing codebase. The main goal of CI is to identify and fix integration errors as quickly as possible, maintaining a healthy, error-free codebase.

– Continuous Delivery (CD): Extending from CI, Continuous Delivery automates the delivery of the code to a pre-production or staging environment after the build stage. It ensures that the software can be reliably released at any time. This step involves automated testing to validate if the changes work as expected and ensures that the software is always in a releasable state.

– Continuous Deployment: This is similar to Continuous Delivery, but takes automation a step further. In Continuous Deployment, every change that passes through the pipeline is automatically deployed to production, without the need for manual intervention. This allows for very fast feedback loops and can accelerate the pace of software releases.

The CI/CD pipeline automates the steps involved in delivering a software product, from code integration to deployment, reducing manual errors, improving team productivity, and enabling