Six Ways To Build A Strong CI/CD Pipeline

Continuous integration, delivery, and deployment, also referred to as CI/CD, are essential components of contemporary development meant to speed up projects while reducing integration and deployment failures. The CI/CD set of techniques emphasizes automated testing at every level of the development pipeline and is frequently supported by powerful tooling. You can shorten the time needed to integrate changes for a release and properly test each change before putting it into production by adding these concepts into your workflow.

Here are six major factors that I frequently observe lacking in CI/CD pipelines and which can assist any developer or team advance and enhancing their work processes.

1. Add performance, device compatibility, and accessibility testing

Testing for accessibility, device compatibility, and performance is frequently a manual process and something that some teams do execute partially. The delivery cycle can be slowed down by manually testing for these issues, thus many teams just absorb the expenses or choose not to do so.

2. Incorporate more automated security testing

Security is an essential component of your software delivery process and is crucial in the environments of today. Even yet, we have observed a number of teams and businesses who approach security as an addition to the DevOps process and do not include automated security testing in their CI/CD pipelines.

GitHub-specific tools like Dependabot, code, and secret scanning can help you mitigate any potential issues in your dependencies by scanning them for outdated packages and automatically creating pull requests for teams to fix them.

3. Build a phased testing strategy

A great way to guarantee that you can quickly and widely distribute secure software is to use phased testing. With phased testing, you can catch the big things early and get faster feedback on your codebase.

The objective is to create a quick build that quickly evaluates the foundational components using easier tests, such as unit tests. After that, you might deploy your build to a test environment to run further tests, including some user testing and longer-running ones like accessibility testing. This indicates that you’re sorting through a variety of potential problems by prioritizing the most important aspects.

4. Invest in blue-green deployments for easier rollouts

Blue-green deployments are one way to improve how you roll out a new version of an application in your CI/CD pipeline. It includes having two or more versions of your program in use and gradually transferring users to a newer version. This means that you can gradually transition your users across to the updated or newly deployed version of an application in a production environment that is “unused.” The benefit of this is you can quickly roll back any changes by redirecting users to another prod environment.

5. Adopt infrastructure-as-code for greater flexibility

Building IT infrastructure as you need it is known as infrastructure provisioning. Some teams use infrastructure-as-code (IaC) in their CI/CD pipelines to automatically provision resources at certain points in the pipeline. It helps you make sure that your application and the infrastructure it runs on are routinely being tested in tandem. It also, helps you mitigate any real-time issues with your infrastructure.

6. Create checkpoints for automated rollbacks

Automation makes it simpler and faster to roll back a release to a previous application version. I think of a rollback as a broad word for reverting to a previous version in order to mitigate production issues, whether that involves redeploying or recovering from a backup. If your CI/CD pipeline is strong, you should be able to quickly resolve issues and release updates, preventing the need to return to an earlier app version.

Conclusion:

While each CI/CD implementation will be different, following some of these fundamental guidelines will help you stay clear of certain common problems and improve your testing and development procedures.

Automate and orchestrate your software integration and deployment with iVedha’s CI-CD pipeline services, for smooth, transparent, and efficient workflows. iVedha is a reliable Managed IT Services provider with over a decade of industry presence in delivering end-to-end DevOps services and enabling CI/CD for our customers. We can help you automate the way you build, test, and deploy your applications and ensure cost-efficient and secure software delivery.

For more information contact us today.