CI/CD Pipelines — Overview

What is CI/CD?

CI/CD stands for Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery. It automates the steps between writing code and running it in production.

Continuous Integration: Every commit triggers automated build and tests.

Continuous Delivery: After CI passes, artifact is deployed to staging automatically.

Continuous Deployment: Fully automated — code goes to production after all checks pass.

Pipeline Stages

Code Commit → Build → Unit Tests → Integration Tests → Security Scan → Artifact Push → Deploy Staging → Smoke Tests → [Approval] → Deploy Production → Monitor

Tools Compared

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GitHub Actions Example

name: Build and Deploy
on:
  push:
    branches: [main]
jobs:
  test:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v4
      - run: npm ci && npm test
  deploy:
    needs: test
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - run: helm upgrade --install myapp ./chart --set image.tag=${{ github.sha }}

Deployment Strategies

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