Best Practices in CI/CD Implementation
Tags: devops, cicd
Published: 2024-04-16 11:24:25

Any effective DevOps process's foundation is continuous integration and delivery, or CI/CD. Teams must stay updated with CI/CD best practices to accomplish modern software development. Continuous Integration/Continuous Development is a crucial step in developing cloud applications. Best practices must be adopted to execute CI/CD, which can improve your results. Using best practices is vital since it guarantees that the software will be delivered on time, of the highest possible quality, and with few defects. It also promotes teamwork and facilitates streamlining the entire software development process.  You can collaborate with a [cloud consulting company](https://successive.tech/cloud-consulting/) to help you implement modern approaches. We'll discuss some of the best CI/CD implementation practices in this blog. 

## What is Continuous Integration?
Continuous Integration (CI) is a development process in which code changes are regularly incorporated into a shared repository, usually many times daily. Each integration is then validated using an automated build and tests, allowing teams to identify mistakes early and maintain a consistent codebase. CI encourages developer collaboration, lowers integration difficulties, and allows for more rapid feedback loops.

## What is Continuous Deployment?
Continuous Deployment automates every step of the deployment process, expanding on the concepts of Continuous Integration. Every code change that goes through the CI pipeline is automatically deployed to production with CD, which reduces the time to market and removes the need for manual intervention. This method guarantees that consumers may receive updates and fixes in a timely and dependable manner.

## Best Practices for CI/CD 

**Here are some best practices for CI/ CD that you must know:**

* **Build just once:** It is not advisable to create a fresh build for every phase as this could lead to inconsistent results. Rather, encourage the same build artifacts at every CI/CD pipeline level. An environment-agnostic build is needed for this.

- **Fail fast:** Developers contributing code to continuous integration (CI) must be notified as soon as possible if there are problems so they can undo the changes and address them while the code is still fresh in their thoughts. Developers are happier when they minimize context switching, which can be done by the "fail fast"method.

- **Clean pre-production environments:** It gets more difficult to keep track of all the upgrades and configuration changes that have been made the longer environments are left up. This is a motivator to tidy up pre-production settings before every deployment.
The most efficient CDs can be done with the minimal tools possible.

- **Set up monitoring:** Time and money can be saved by keeping a close check on the production process. Important business-related data points can also be obtained from it.

Start the hands-free deployment phase, when modifications can be automatically sent to production, as soon as continuous delivery is operating smoothly.

## Conclusion

Automation of the software development, testing, and release processes is the main objective of CI/CD best practices. But how to know and implement best CI/CD practices that align with your cloud operating model. You need cloud transformation services. This implies that in order to streamline automation and improve your insight into the development of your product, you will require access to DevOps tools. In addition, a system for monitoring DevOps performance metrics throughout the software delivery lifecycle should be in place. This would allow for the prompt recovery of issues that arise during release or deployment. I hope you got an idea of the best practices of CI/CD implementation. 

**Good Luck!**