CICD

CICD stands for continuous integration, continuous delivery or deployment. It basically automates how code is built, tested, published, and deployed.

Some examples of CICD:

• Jenkins
• CircleCI
• Travis CI
• Tekton

Continuous integration means that as code is being changed, a service will automatically build it (compile it), and test it. Continuous delivery means the code is published somewhere, like Nexus or Artifactory. Continuous deployment means that the code is automatically installed and run in a cluster.

Typically the delivery or deployment steps would only run for certain branches of code, like the main (or the old-school “master”) branch. If you are using a gitflow pattern, you might have merges into the “develop” branch result in a deployment to your QA cluster.

Your CICD pipelines should be in code and committed to a git repository, so they are version controlled. Previously, teams would often define their pipelines in a UI, and there was no history of changes. That made it impossible to roll them back if there was an issue.