As the world moves towards adopting new technologies, we are now witnessing a change in the way we do software development. The speed at which users demand new product and app updates has increased substantially. For organizations with traditional development teams, delivering these updates and meeting the demands of the market is challenging. To counter this problem, organizations are turning to automated CI/CD pipelines to augment their development teams and modernize their applications. This blog aims to discuss the benefits and tools of CI/CD pipeline automation and how it is changing application development strategies for businesses.
Automate CI/CD Pipeline for secure, robust & Streamlined application development
What is CI/CD pipeline automation
A continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipeline is a series of steps that must be performed for a new version of the software to roll out. The entire process handles the entire lifecycle of the software, from first developing to releasing it on its very first day. CI/CD focuses on advancing software delivery along the development life cycle by automating each step in its entirety. While CI/CD pipelines can be built as a manual and human intensive process, there is more value to be derived with automating the journey from development to delivery.
Advantages of CI/CD pipeline
The idea of a CI/CD pipeline is to make the development process faster and easier than ever before, and to help the developers focus on writing better code that doesn’t break. Here are a few advantages –
- Integrate and build in parts – CI/CD pipelines allow integration of code in pieces. Smaller pieces of code are more manageable than large ones and lesser chances for repairs. These smaller pieces of code can be tested once integrated allowing for proactive correction, if the need arises.
- Isolate impact – Fault isolation which limits the negative impact of a faulty code, helps developers to maintain and repair errors. CI/CD pipelines allow for faster fault detection and easily implement fault isolation for a more sturdy deployment.
- Reduce downtime – MTTR or the average time it takes to repair a broken feature can be reduced significantly with a sound CI/CD pipeline, owing to the small size of codes and fault isolation. It helps improve business’ risk assurance to guard against and recover from the failure of a feature.
- Strengthen feature quality – By incorporating test reliability into the CI/CD pipeline, continuous reliability improves the quality of every feature. With continuous merging and deploying code after the testing phase, CI/CD pipelines also allow for faster release rates.
- Streamline development efforts – Automating the process allows the developer to focus more product development rather than worrying about code failures. With better code quality comes better costs and improved RoI.
Niveus CI/CD pipeline tools
As a cloud engineering services company, Niveus has been helping businesses across industries build robust Google Cloud CI/CD pipelines for faster velocity on new feature releases. By blending both Google Cloud Native tools as well as Open Source tools, Niveus accelerates your release cycles from building and testing to deployment. Here are a few of the tools we use to build secure pipelines –
- Jenkins with GKE – Combining Jenkins, an open-source automation server that lets you flexibly orchestrate your build, test, and deployment pipelines with Kubernetes Engine, a powerful cluster manager and orchestration system for containers, carries key benefits that trump a standard VM-based deployment
- Ansible with GCP – An integration with Ansible and GCP gives developers everything they need for the IT management requirements.
- Cloud Build on GCP – Cloud Build helps to manage and execute your builds! It offers a reliable service that can, amongst other things, import code from all standard sources, build your project in the language of your choice and produce artifacts such as Docker containers or Java archives
- Google Cloud Deploy – A managed service with automated applications delivery to a series of target environments in a defined promotion sequence
- Cloud source repositories – Fully-featured, private Git repositories that are hosted on Google Cloud Platform. Easy to collaborate and with effective code control, these allow you to privately access and manage your code across you owned repositories
- Artifact Registry – Artifact Registry prides itself in being a single location to manage packages and Docker container images. It integrates with CI/CD tools and Google Cloud runtime environments so that you can manage the full artifact lifecycle with ease
CI/CD pipeline automation is the future of software development and it is here to stay. At Niveus, we are committed to helping our customers move faster by offering them the tools they need to deploy and update their software at scale. Contact us @ biz@niveussolutions.com today to see how we can help you.
