DevOps Demystified: Understanding CI/CD Pipelines and Essential Tools

Ever wondered what makes DevOps tick? In this post, we’ll break down CI/CD pipelines and the essential tools you need to know, all in simple terms to help you get a clear grasp of how they work and why they’re crucial for modern development.
Let’s go to the first confusing question

What is DevOps & Why is it Important?

Let’s understand with a story

Gina owns an art gallery and wants to sell her artwork online. To do this, she needs an app. She approaches an IT firm where Harry, the head of the development and operations teams, Avi, the project manager, and Fred, the operations head, explain the process of building, delivering, and maintaining the app.

Gina shares her requirements, and the team begins planning, designing, and developing the app. Once development is complete, Avi asks Fred to deploy the code to the server so that testers can check it out. However, when Fred starts the deployment, the testers can’t access the servers, and their test cases fail. Avi contacts Fred, who is confused because the server shows everything is fine. The regular code updates and deployments are causing problems, and the ops team is overwhelmed by frequent, unclear requests.

The project is delayed, and Gina, who is eagerly waiting for her app, is frustrated. Avi is also upset with the ops team’s performance, and tensions rise between development and operations. The developers use an agile approach, making frequent changes and expecting the ops team to handle them quickly without clear instructions. Meanwhile, the ops team follows a more traditional, slower approach.

Enter DevOps. Harry, the director, realizes there’s a problem and brings in a DevOps expert. The expert first helps the development and ops teams understand each other’s roles and challenges. This improves communication and collaboration. Then, he introduces automation techniques to streamline the deployment process.

With DevOps, the barrier between development and operations is removed. The teams start working together more effectively and efficiently, ensuring smoother and faster delivery of the app. Gina finally gets to see her app, and both teams are happier with the improved process.

So,

DevOps is a set of practices, tools, and a cultural philosophy that automate and integrate the processes between software development and IT teams

What is CI/CD ?

CI:

It means Continuous Integration
There is a coder who has created different versions of his code

He pushes the code to a GitHub repository, where other team members can also see it

After this, the code is built, tested, and evaluated and this phase is called Artifact

Problem:

During the build process, many errors and conflicts can occur in the coder's code, and the coder may need to rewrite parts of the code to resolve these issues

Solution:

When a coder commits code, they should build and test it automatically to avoid the hassle of doing it manually every time. Automation can help streamline this process.

This is called Continuous Integration

The Goal of CI is to detect errors early in the process so they don’t multiply

CD:

It means Continuous Deployment

Code changes are automatically deployed to production after passing automated tests, allowing for faster and more reliable releases.

In short:
CD = CI + Automated Deployment + Automated Testing

Tools for Building, Storing, Integrating, and Deploying Software

1. Build Tools

• Maven, Ant, Gradle
• MSBuild, Visual Build
• IBM UrbanCode
• Make
• Grunt

2. Storing Artifacts Tools

• Sonatype Nexus
• JFrog Artifactory
• Archiva
• Cloudsmith package

3. CI Tools

• Jenkins
• CircleCI
• TeamCity
• Bamboo CI
• CruiseControl

4. CD Tools

• System Automation: Ansible, Puppet, Chef
• System Cloud Formation: Terraform, AWS CloudFormation
• CI/CD Automation: Jenkins, Octopus Deploy

In summary, DevOps and CI/CD pipelines are key to modern software development. They help teams work together better, automate tasks, and make the process of delivering software faster and more reliable. By bringing development and operations together, automating testing and deployment, and using the right tools, teams can release updates quickly, fix fewer bugs, and be more satisfied with their work.