What is CI/CD pipeline?

A CI/CD pipeline is an essential part of modern DevOps practices, aimed at automating and streamlining the software development process. The acronym “CI/CD” consists of two main components: Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery/Continuous Deployment (CD). Here’s a breakdown of each component:

1. Continuous Integration (CI): This practice involves automatically integrating code changes from multiple contributors into a central repository several times a day. The primary goal here is to detect and resolve conflicts early, ensuring that the software is always in a releasable state. As soon as the new code is committed and pushed to the repository, it is automatically built and tested. This helps in identifying and fixing bugs quickly, improving software quality, and speeding up the development process.

2. Continuous Delivery (CD): This process extends CI by automatically deploying all code changes to a testing and/or staging environment after the build stage. The aim is to have the software in a deployable state beyond just being releasable by ensuring that the code can be deployed at any time with the click of a button. It focuses on making releases faster and safer by automating the release process so that software can be released to production at any time, ensuring a quick and stable deployment process.

3. Continuous Deployment (CD): Sometimes, Continuous Deployment is what’s meant by the second “CD” in CI/CD, which takes Continuous Delivery to the next level by deploying every change that passes through