An Introduction to Continuous Integration, Delivery, and Deployment

Introduction

Developing and releasing software can be a complicated process, especially as applications, teams, and deployment infrastructure grow in complexity. Often, challenges become more pronounced as projects grow. To develop, test, and release software in a quick and consistent way, developers and organizations have created three related but distinct strategies to manage and automate these processes.

Continuous integration focuses on integrating work from individual developers into a main repository multiple times a day to catch integration bugs early and accelerate collaborative development. Continuous delivery is concerned with reducing friction in the deployment or release process, automating the steps required to deploy a build so that code can be released safely at any time. Continuous deployment takes this one step further by automatically deploying each time a code change is made.

In this guide, we will discuss each of these strategies, how they relate to one another, and how incorporating them into your application life cycle can transform your software development and release practices. To get a better idea of the differences between various open-source CI/CD projects, check out our CI/CD tool comparison.