A pipeline in software engineering is defined as a set of automated processes which allows DevOps professionals and developers to compile, build, and deploy their code to their production compute platforms reliably and efficiently.
The most important components of a pipeline in DevOps are built automation or continuous integration, test automation, and deployment automation.
A set of tools that pipeline consists are classified into the following categories such as:
- Source control
- Build tools
- Containerization
- Configuration management
- Monitoring
Continuous Integration Pipeline
In Continuous Integration (CI) developers check their code into a version-controlled repository several times per day. Automated build pipelines are triggered nightly or weekly (as configured) which allows fast and easy-to-locate error detection.
Some significant benefits of CI are:
- Minor changes are easy to integrate into large codebases.
- Integration issues are less as the code is getting integrated regularly allowing rapid code delivery.
- Early identification of bugs, making them easier to fix, resulting in less debugging work.
Continuous delivery (CD) enables operation engineers and developers and accelerates the delivery of bug fixes, features, and configuration change into production reliably, quickly, and sustainably.
Some significant benefits of the CD are:
- Accelerated delivery of bug fixes and features.
- It allows the team to work on features and bug fixes in small batches, which means user feedback is received much quicker. The overall time and cost of the project are hence reduced.
