Why Do You Need CI/CD Tools?
Continuous Integration is a practice involving a set of standards and tools used by development teams. These standards and tools are used to merge frequent changes into a version control repository. The goal of CI is to create a reliable, automated method of building, packaging, and testing software applications.
Continuous Delivery is used to automate the pushing of those code changes to a destination environment. CI/CD tools help keep track of the parameters specific to each environment, packaging the relevant parameters with every delivery. CI/CD tools are also used to make calls to databases, web servers, and other services that must respond in some way when an application is deployed.
CI practices, like frequently committing code to version control repositories, make it easier to find errors and other software quality issues by using smaller, more incremental code updates rather than large updates delivered over longer periods of time. Fixes to errors can be done quickly and easily, or the application can be rolled-back to a stable version if needed. CD strategies are used to automate the process of pushing application updates to their respective delivery environments, saving a team’s time and resources. Deployment tools also report the status of deployment steps, allowing DevOps engineers to track the health and status of their deployment pipelines.
Once CI/CD strategies and tools are utilized by a company, engineers can spend more time on enhancing the application’s functionality and features, worrying less about the details of integration and delivery.
Conclusion
Choosing the right CI/CD tools will help your engineers spend less time on integration and delivery and more time on developing a quality product. There are a variety of top CI/CD options you can use which will be covered by the second part of this blog series.