CI/CD vs. DevOps: The Evolution of Software Development
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Are you confused between CI/CD and DevOps? You’re not alone!
Many beginners consider DevOps and CI/CD to be the same. DevOps provides a culture to collaborate across development and operations teams, while CI/CD focuses on automating code integration, testing, and deployment as part of that culture.
Even this is one of the most talked-about topics in the software world. On Quora, you’ll find endless threads like this one with different answers from different people, but no satisfactory and comprehensive answer is available. That’s why we are covering this topic.
What is DevOps?
As the term DevOps describes, it combines the software development (Dev) and IT operations (Ops) teams to streamline the software development workflow. Its main aim is to automate the entire application development life cycle, from the planning stage to the deployment stage.
Here are a few core principles of DevOps:
- Collaboration and Communication: A great DevOps team encourages effective collaboration and communication.
- Automation: DevOps automates a few key areas of the software development to reduce human errors. For instance, it encourages teams to use AI tools in the planning and software development stage to speed up processes, as well as CI/CD tools to automate the build, test, and deployment processes.
- Continuous Improvement: DevOps encourages teams to learn from real-world performance and continuously use that feedback to improve the software development workflow.
So, DevOps is a culture and best practices that every organization should follow for reliable software delivery.
What is CI/CD?
CI/CD (Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery/Deployment) is a software development pipeline that helps DevOps teams automate the building, testing, and deployment of code changes. Its main aim is to release software frequently with very little manual intervention.
With Continuous Integration (CI), developers frequently commit and merge code changes to a shared common repository. A CI pipeline automatically runs builds and test cases and conducts the code review whenever any code changes are pushed to the shared repository. It allows developers to fix the errors and bugs in the early stages of development before they cause any problems in the production environment.
Continuous Delivery (CD) works with the Continuous Integration (CI) pipeline that automates the infrastructure provisioning and application release. Once the code is built and testing is done in the CI pipeline, CD deploys the code changes to the staging environments and prepares them to push into production.
Next, Continuous Deployment is responsible for automatically deploying the application when deployment criteria defined by DevOps teams are met.
DevOps vs. CI/CD: Key Differences
| Aspect | DevOps | CI/CD |
|---|---|---|
| Definition | DevOps encourages the software development and IT operation teams to work together to improve collaboration and speed up software delivery. | The CI/CD pipeline is a part of DevOps and focuses on automating the code integration, build, test, and deployment processes throughout the software development life cycle. |
| Main aim | Its main purpose is to promote shared responsibility between teams and improve the overall software development workflow. | Its main aim is to automate repetitive tasks and catch bugs automatically during the software delivery process. |
| Scope | DevOps is broader in scope. It covers the entire software development process, from planning to coding, integration, building, testing, deployment, monitoring, infrastructure management, etc. | CI/CD mainly focuses on code integrations, testing, and deployment. |
| Team Involvement | Business analysts, project managers, developers, testers, system admins, operations staff, QA testers, etc., are all involved in the DevOps practices. | Generally, developers and testers are involved in setting up and monitoring the CI/CD pipeline. |
| Tools Used | Azure DevOps, Copilot4DevOps, Modern Requirements, Docker, Kubernetes, Ansible, Terraform, Prometheus, etc. | Jenkins is a widely used tool for integrating a CI/CD pipeline in the DevOps workflow. However, some organizations also use tools like GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, CircleCI, Travis CI, etc. |
| Deployment Approach | If the CI/CD pipeline is not integrated within DevOps, teams may need to follow manual steps for the deployments. | CI/CD can fully automate the deployment. Once developers make code changes, it automatically builds, tests, and pushes the code to production. |
| Benefits |
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| Use Cases | Amazon uses DevOps practices to manage AWS services and large-scale infrastructure. Their developers and operations teams work as a single unit, and developers are also involved in the build, test, deployment, monitoring, etc. DevOps helps Amazon to scale globally and reduce downtime. |
Etsy, a popular e-commerce brand, uses CI/CD pipelines for quicker deployments. Etsy uses Jenkins to automate testing and code releases. Etsy developers push the code changes more than 50 times a day. Each time, automated tests get triggered, and once all tests are passed, it automatically deploys the code. This way, Etsy can quickly release new features without significant delay. |
How Does CI/CD Fit Into DevOps?
CI/CD is one of the best practices that makes the DevOps workflow smoother. Setting up CI/CD pipelines is not just about starting to use tools — it’s all about defining a series of steps to automate different processes.
Here is the step-by-step guide to setting up a CI/CD pipeline in the DevOps culture.
- Prepare requirements: The first step is to prepare clear and traceable requirements for setting up the CI/CD pipeline. Teams using Azure DevOps as project planning software can adapt Copilot4DevOps, a built-in AI assistant for requirements management within Azure DevOps, to automate requirements management.
- Select the Right CI/CD Tool: While selecting the right tool, you should assess current requirements and consider factors like the team’s familiarity, current infrastructure, etc. Once everything is clear, select any tool like Azure DevOps, Jenkins, GitHub Actions, etc.
- Set Up Environment for CI/CD: Set up the source control systems like GitHub, which will manage and store all code changes.
- Set Up Continuous Integration (CI): The next step is to set up the CI/CD tools you selected in the previous step. The tool should automatically build the code and run test cases when the team pushes code changes to GitHub.
- Set Up Continuous Delivery (CD): Next, configure the tool to automatically push the code to the staging environment once it passes all test cases in the CI stage.
- Set Up Continuous Deployment: Once code changes are double-checked in staging environments, they should be moved to production. So, set up the tool accordingly.
- Automate and Monitor: Once you have configured tools for each step, automate each step of the pipeline and continuously monitor the logs in the pipeline to detect bugs.
Bonus Tip: Bring AI Into the DevOps
AI is gaining more popularity in DevOps, which involves using Artificial Intelligence to automate and optimize the DevOps process. Teams can use AI in DevOps to:
- Automate requirements management
- Automate resource provisioning to save resources.
- Monitor systems to catch bugs before they cause big problems.
- Write Code
- Generate no-code prototypes and mockups for the demo.
- Generate test cases
Furthermore, tools like Copilot4DevOps can help teams to automate requirements gathering, impact analysis, requirements analysis, document and report creation, no-code prototype generation, diagram generation, etc. With these features of Copilot4DevOps, teams can improve their overall DevOps workflow.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
Q1: Are DevOps and CI/CD the same?
No, DevOps is a collaborative culture where the development and operational teams work together, and CI/CD is a best practice to automate code integration, build, testing, and deployment. However, CI/CD is a part of DevOps.
Q2: Which tool is used to implement a CI/CD pipeline?
There are multiple tools available to implement a CI/CD pipeline in your DevOps workflow. These tools include Jenkins, Azure DevOps, CircleCI, etc.
Q3: Is Kubernetes a CI/CD tool?
Yes, Kubernetes can also be used to implement the CI/CD pipeline.
Q4: Can Copilot4DevOps write code?
Yes, Copilot4DevOps can write pseudocode and test scripts in the required programming languages.
