CI/CD – Building Quality Software Automatically

In my career, someone once said to me, “CI/CD is dead, long live CI/CD.” Of course, this phrase doesn’t mean it’s completely dead. It simply means CI/CD is now becoming the standard for software development, a common practice developers should adopt and learn during a software development life cycle. It is now considered part of your development process as opposed to being a shiny, new process.

In this chapter, we’ll review what Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) means and how to prepare your code for a pipeline. Once we’ve covered the necessary changes to include in your code, we’ll discuss what a common pipeline looks like for building software. Once we understand the pipeline process, we’ll look at two ways to recover from an unsuccessful deployment and how to deploy databases. We’ll also cover the three different types of cloud services available to you (on and off-premises and hybrid) and review a list of the top CI/CD providers on the internet. Finally, we’ll walk you through the process of creating a build for a sample application, along with other types of projects.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

• What is CI/CD?
• Preparing your Code
• Understanding the Pipeline
• The Two “Falling” Approaches
• Deploying Databases
• The three Types of Build Providers
• CI/CD Providers
• Walkthrough of Azure Pipelines

After you’ve completed this chapter, you’ll be able to identify flaws in software when you’re preparing code for software deployment, understand what a common pipeline includes in producing quality software, identify two ways of recovering from an unsuccessful deployment, know how to deploy databases through a pipeline, understand the different types of CI/CD providers, and know some key players in the CI/CD provider space.

Finally, we’ll walk through a common pipeline in Azure Pipelines to encompass everything we’ve learned in this chapter.