CI/CD

CI/CD stands for Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (or Continuous Deployment). Together they describe the practice of automating the build, test, and release of software so changes move from a developer's commit to production frequently and with minimal manual handling.

How it works

A typical pipeline starts when a developer pushes to a branch. The CI server checks out the code, installs dependencies, runs linters, builds artifacts, executes tests, and reports results to the version control system. A successful build often triggers downstream stages: container builds, deployment to staging, end-to-end tests, and promotion to production. Production deployment strategies range from full rollout to gradual exposure via canary, blue-green, or feature flags.

Common tools

• Hosted CI: GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, CircleCI, Buildkite, Bitbucket Pipelines
• Self-hosted: Jenkins, Drone, Tekton, Argo Workflows
• CD and GitOps: ArgoCD, Flux, Spinnaker, Harness
• Artifact registries: Docker Hub, GitHub Packages, AWS ECR, JFrog Artifactory