Let’s face it. Your neighbor’s annoying nephew can learn to code on Codecademy, W3Schools, or FreeCodeCamp. It is not that hard. What is hard is listening to him pass snide remarks on how your computer engineering college degree is worthless… Lord Give You Patience. This is why he’ll be programming as a hobby while you’ll be running teams that comprise of many such nephews. You’re DevOps. You’ve got a cool portmanteau to go with it too.
✳️ WTF is CI/CD?
As a DevOps guy (or gal), you ensure that the software development life cycle is as short as possible while ensuring code-quality, code-cleanliness, and above all, timely deployments. This is why Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery or CI/CD (also written as CICD) is something that you either totally love or have been intimidated by, for a really long time now. Also, you need to workaround team members who think like this —
Continuous Integration or CI can be best summed up as the simultaneous development and testing of code so that errors and bugs from when Obama was President do not have to wait for Trump to get addressed.
Continuous Delivery or CD is best understood as releasing/deploying to production more frequently than not. Remember your Facebook app on your mobile, that updates almost everyday - that’s CD for you.
What happens when you combine the two? You get what is widely called a “best practices guideline to ensure production reliability at all times” or as we like to call it — make your Developer’s life more painful by adding in more frequent unit testings, more code reviews, and more testers breathing down their necks.
This is why there exist solutions to help take the pain out of the entire software deployment lifecycle by automating the entire process. For example, this newsletter’s sponsor - CircleCI goes a step further and integrates an automated testing, notification system, and deployment to ensure that you can push your code with the confidence that you haven’t felt in months (or was it years?).
If you’re looking for a faster feedback loop, avoid integration hell, or simply looking for more transparency and reliability from your code, CI/CD is your best bet.
There are however, a few pitfalls in CI/CD that you must avoid. For example, using the wrong metrics for testing is all that it takes to bring the entire cycle come crashing down. Power cuts both ways and we will talk about a few CI/CD horror stories from real companies and how you can avoid them, in the next part.
Before you leave, check out some awesome stories on CI/CD, its potential and its application by Hacker Noon contributors.
If you have a few (or many) experiences to share, you can become a contributor on Hacker Noon too. Simply create an account, and join 10,000+ contributors sharing their knowledge and expertise with the rest of us. Maybe you'll get featured on our next newsletter too. Until then...
