Source of this article: about.gitlab.com

By Valerie Silverthorne

Translator: Content Team of GitLab Marketing Department

CI/CD is at the heart of successful DevOps practices, and teams that want to modernize application development must follow CI/CD best practices. How to make sure your team is using CI/CD correctly? The following content is for your reference.

What is CI/CD?

CI/CD is both a technical process, an idea, and a series of steps... CI/CD includes all of the above. In short, CI/CD enables DevOps teams to simplify code commits through automation.

CI (Continuous Integration) simplifies software building and source code integration, enables version control, and promotes good collaboration through automation;
After CI is over, continuous delivery (CD) begins to automate testing and deployment. CD not only reduces the many drawbacks caused by manual operations in the delivery and deployment process, but also allows teams to greatly reduce the number of tools used to manage the software life cycle.

What are some best practices for CI/CD?

If you want to succeed with CI/CD, make Continuous Integration, Continuous Delivery, and Continuous Deployment a habit of your team, as they are the cornerstones of software development practices. The goal of DevOps is to deliver software to users faster, and CI/CD practices will make this a reality.

If you ask 10 DevOps teams about their CI/CD practices, you'll get 10 different answers. But the following aspects are unanimously respected:

Build only once: don't create a new build for each stage, that risks inconsistencies. In CI/CD pipelines, it is recommended to use the same build artifact (environment-independent build);
Simplify testing: strike a balance between test coverage and performance. If test results take a long time to appear, users will try to bypass these processes;
Fail fast: On the CI side, developers who submit code need to know whether there is a problem with the code they submitted as soon as possible, so that they can quickly roll back and fix it when they are familiar with the code. The "fail fast" philosophy helps developers reduce context switching and makes DevOps professionals happier;
Commit daily: the more regularly code is committed, the more value the DevOps team will see;
Fix it if it breaks: CI/CD makes it easier to fix failed builds;
Empty pre-production environments: The longer an environment continues to run, the harder it is to track configuration changes and updates applied to the environment. It is good practice to empty the pre-production environment between each deployment;
Always Automate: Continuously tune your CI/CD pipeline to ensure continuous automation;
Clear steps: ensure that release and rollback plans are clearly documented and understood by the entire team;
Stay secure: CI/CD is a shift left, so it presents a great opportunity to integrate security early into the process;
Feedback loops: Make sure the entire team has an easy way to receive (or contribute) feedback.

Dive into best practices for CDs

CD (Continuous Delivery/Deployment) is also worth digging into their best practices, although CI always steals the limelight. The following are best practices for CDs:

Get started now: don’t wait for new platforms, start tweaking existing ones to make them faster and more efficient;
Less is more: the best CDs are made with the fewest tools;
Track what's going on: Issues and Merge Requests can get out of hand, but Milestone can help, for example when setting up agile sprints and releases, Milestone does double duty: helps track everything that's going on; makes planned deliveries;
Automated deployment changes: Simplify user acceptance testing and staging environment deployment through automation;
Manage the release pipeline: automate everything;
Establish monitoring: Paying close attention to the production process can save time and money, and can also provide key data to the business side;
Start Continuous Deployment: Once you start Continuous Delivery, take your hands off deployment and deploy changes to production through automation.

How can I improve my CI/CD pipeline?

The so-called pipeline is really just a way to describe the series of steps involved in deploying a new version of software. Monitoring and automation are introduced into CI/CD to improve the application development process, especially during the integration and testing phases, as well as the software delivery and deployment phases.

A typical CI/CD pipeline should have these elements: planning, analysis, design, build, test, release, deployment, validation, compliance, and maintenance. These steps can all be implemented manually, but the value of a CI/CD pipeline lies in its automation.

If you are fine-tuning your CI/CD pipeline, here are some things to consider to enhance performance:

Hybrid release strategy. A canary release (or canary deployment) might be worth considering. In a canary release, only a specific group of users sees the deployment of new features.
Add more automated tests , because you can't have too many automated tests.
Keep doing subtraction. Fewer tools means fewer manual operations and steps. If CI/CD is part of a DevOps platform, then everything should be on one platform.
Consider software component analysis a regular practice to ensure DevOps teams keep track of important open source software issues.

How to measure CI/CD success?

DevOps teams may not know how well their CI/CD practices are performing unless they can measure them. Metrics play an important role in improving system performance and helping identify where value can be added, and also provide a baseline for the impact of any improvement.

Here are some metrics to measure the success of CI/CD:

➤Cycle _

Refers to the time it takes from starting to write code to rolling out a feature.

To calculate the average cycle time, it is necessary to measure the entire phase of the development process. This metric provides insight into overall development time as well as process bottlenecks.

➤Time to Realize Value

Refers to how long it takes to publish code written. Integration, testing, delivery, and deployment should take minutes to hours to complete the testing cycle. If building a CI/CD pipeline takes days to complete, no value is realized and the entire process needs to be adjusted.

➤ Continuous running time

Uptime is a measure of stability and reliability, one of the top priorities for operations teams.

When CI/CD strategies are automated, operations leaders can spend more time focusing on system stability and less time on workflow issues.

➤ Error rate

Application error rates are a given in the R&D process. Tracking error rates is important because error rates can indicate not only quality issues, but ongoing performance issues as well as issues related to uptime.

High uptime and high error rates indicate common CI/CD challenges between development and operations teams.

➤Infrastructure cost

In cloud native development, infrastructure cost is very important. Deploying and managing a CI/CD platform can be costly if left unchecked. To determine how they price, cloud vendors will consider network hardware, infrastructure maintenance and labor costs.

➤Team retention rate

We know it: when developers or anyone really feels valued and valued, they stay.

When the team cooperates tacitly, then retention is the inevitable result. On the contrary, developers may feel uncomfortable when cooperation is not smooth, progress is slow, etc. Potential problems can be spotted by looking at team retention.

What are the benefits of following CI/CD best practices?

When best practices are followed, the benefits of CI/CD permeate the entire organization:

From HR to operations, the team can work better and achieve the ultimate goal; building metrics around CI/CD performance can not only provide insights about development, but also extend to many aspects of the business; a well-functioning CI/CD pipeline can A game changer for DevOps teams.

Here are some huge advantages:

Developers are not fixing things, they are writing code. Fewer tools and toolchains means less time spent maintaining tools and more time producing high-quality software.

Code is production. Don't wait in line for code, but jump right into the real world. This gives developers a sense of accomplishment in receiving timely feedback.

Developers can focus on solving business problems. Simplified CI/CD pipelines allow developers to really focus on what matters, rather than being distracted by problematic code, tedious manual operations, production issues, etc.

It is easier to innovate. It's a competitive world, and organizations need all the tools at their disposal to stay ahead. A well-structured CI/CD process can make software development easier, faster and safer, which also means that DevOps teams have more time and energy to innovate.

Attract and retain talent. The labor market is highly competitive, and DevOps talent is hard to impress. Instead of saying, "We value our DevOps team," make some real investments around CI/CD processes and technologies.

Everyone plays to their strengths. The CI/CD pipeline helps R&D, operation and maintenance, security, and testing perform their duties and give full play to their strengths.

CI/CD deployment strategy

Remember, the goal of CI/CD is to get software into the hands of customers faster and better, increasing productivity. The trick is to adopt a deployment strategy that works well within the enterprise. Here are some strategies to make CI/CD successful:

commit code frequently;
Automate the build process;
Run tests in parallel and build a deployment pipeline;
Fail fast and take a shift left approach, giving developers the skills and tools to accelerate without disrupting the overall process;
Use a CI tool that gets feedback quickly.

How to implement CI/CD in an organization?

Before implementing any software, it is critical to determine what the business drivers are and the same is true for CI/CD adoption, all R&D stakeholders should be involved in the implementation process as early as possible. Developers should provide input, as they will be the primary users of the product.

While this may seem counter-intuitive since CI/CD is about accelerating the pace of software delivery in an automated fashion, the process needs to be started with a slow and steady mindset.

Consistency is important during integration. Perform unit testing, manual releases, and track metrics. Then decide what can and should be automated.

Follow CI/CD best practices to allow efficient implementation of the entire team