What is CI/CD [Systems Design Sunday]

This is a term that is thrown around a lot in Job postings. But what does this mean?

Nov 28, 2022

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The term CI/CD(continuous integration & delivery) has taken the world by storm recently.

But what does it mean? How can teams implement it and what are the benefits of this approach? Is it just another fancy buzzword created by engineering managers to fill up time or does this have any Merit? It is time for the most woke cult in Tech to cover HRs new favorite term.

Important Points

What is CI/CD- As stated, CI/CD stands for continuous integration & delivery. It is built on a simple principle, commit and merge your code changes often. The committed code is run through an automated workflow to test for compliance with standards and accepted if it’s good.
The CI- The first part of this process is CI or continuous integration. It means exactly what it sounds like- continuously integrate any changes you make to the code. Developers may commit their code several times a day. This ensures that everything is always updated. Let’s say I make changes to a data pipeline by changing the way data is collected. Someone working on APIs that transform the data should make sure their process isn’t outdated. Constantly integrating new changes adds protection against this.
The CD- If someone had to manually review and merge every change, things would get out of control. This is where the CD (continuous delivery)step comes in. Any committed change is run through an automated series of builds before the commit is fully accepted. Once a commit has been accepted, it is then quickly integrated into the production.
Benefits of CI/CD- This approach comes with several benefits, but they can all be boiled into one essence- smoothness. CI/CD makes working with large teams across time zones much easier. The presence of automated tests is great to ensure that the code change doesn’t break anything. By its very nature, the changes in CI/CD are very small, so detecting bugs/problems is much easier. It also ensures that every change made is accounted for, and thus is great in large projects where people might work on related components without ever interacting with each other.
The drawbacks- CI/CD is one of the few approaches without a large drawback. There are no benefits to avoiding it. However, it does require some work to be done well. Make sure all your tests are comprehensive. Designing a good CI/CD pipeline can add some overhead to your team’s operations, which may not be worthwhile if your team/project isn’t very large. However, these are mostly minor and don’t diminish the benefits. As with everything else, study this concept, and use the parts that are most useful to your situation.

This is a longer video on CI/CD. It covers the ideal pipeline and was something that I felt had a lot of value.

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