CI/CD best practices make the R&D team more efficient!

Table of contents

What is CI/CD?

What are the best practices for CI/CD?

Dive into CD best practices

How to improve your CI/CD pipeline?

How do you measure the success of CI/CD?

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

CI/CD deployment strategy

How to implement CI/CD in your organization?

Source of this article:about.gitlab.com

作者：Valerie Silverthorne

Translator:GitLab Marketing Department Content Team

CI/CD is at the core of successful DevOps practices, and teams that want to modernize application development must adhere to CI/CD best practices. How do you ensure 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. Simply put, CI/CD enables DevOps teams to streamline code submissions through automation.

CI (Continuous Integration) simplifies software building and source code integration, enables version control, and promotes good collaboration through automation;
After CI ends, continuous delivery (CD) begins with automated testing and deployment. CD not only reduces the many disadvantages 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 the best practices for CI/CD?

If you want to be successful with CI/CD, make continuous integration, continuous delivery, and continuous deployment a habit for your team, because they are the cornerstone 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. However, the following aspects are unanimously praised by everyone:

Build only once:Do not create a new build for each stage, which risks inconsistencies. In CI/CD pipelines, it is recommended to use the same build artifact (environment-independent builds);
Simplify testing:Strike a balance between test coverage and performance. If test results take a long time to appear, users will try to circumvent the process;
Fail fast:On the CI side, the developers who submitted the code need to know as soon as possible whether there are problems with the code they submitted, so that they can quickly roll back when they are familiar with the code. and repair. "Fail fast" philosophy helps developers reduce context switching and makes DevOps professionals happier;
Daily commits:The more regularly code is committed, the more value the DevOps team will see;
Fix it if it’s wrong:CI/CD makes it easier to fix failed builds;
Clear the pre-production environment:The longer the environment continues to run, the more difficult it is to track the configuration changes and updates applied to the environment. It's a good practice to clear your pre-production environment between each deployment;
Always automate:Continuously adjust CI/CD pipelines to ensure continuous automation;
Clear steps:Ensure release and rollback plans are clearly documented and understood by the entire team;
Keep security:CI/CD is a shift left, so it provides a great opportunity to integrate security into the early process;
Feedback Loops:Make sure the entire team has an easy way to receive (or contribute) feedback.

Dive into CD best practices

CD (Continuous Delivery/Deployment) also deserves a closer look at their best practices, although the limelight is always stolen by CI. The following are best practices for CDs:

Start now:Don’t wait for new platforms, start with the ones you already have and tweak them to make them faster and more efficient;
Less is more:The best CDs are made with the fewest tools;
Track what's happening:Issues and Merge Requests can get out of control, but Milestone can help. For example, when setting up agile sprints and releases, Milestone serves a dual purpose: Help Keep track of everything in progress; make planned deliveries;
Automated deployment of changes:Simplify user acceptance testing and staging environment deployment through automation;
Manage release pipeline:Automate everything;
Establish monitoring:Paying close attention to the production process can save time and money, and 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 to improve your CI/CD pipeline?

The so-called pipeline is actually just a way of describing 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: plan, analyze, design, build, test, release, deploy, verify, comply, and maintain. These steps can all be implemented manually, but the value of a CI/CD pipeline lies in automation.

If you want to fine-tune your CI/CD pipeline, consider the following points to enhance performance:

Hybrid publishing strategy. Canary release (or canary deployment) may be worth considering. In a canary release, only specific user groups see new feature deployments.
Add more automated tests, because you can never have too many automated tests.
Continue 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.
Make software component analysis a regular practice to ensure DevOps teams continue to track important open source software issues.

How do you measure the success of CI/CD?

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 to identify where value can be added, providing a baseline for the impact of any improvements.

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

➤ Cyclic period

Refers to the time it takes from starting to write code to rolling out functional features.

To calculate the average cycle time, the entire stage of the development process needs to be measured. This metric provides insight into overall development time as well as process bottlenecks.

➤ Value realization time

Refers to how long it takes to release code written. Integration, testing, delivery and deployment should take anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours to complete the testing cycle. If building a CI/CD pipeline takes days to complete, value is not realized and the entire process needs to be adjusted.

➤ Length of transportation

Uptime is a measure of stability and reliability, which is one of the top priorities of the operations team.

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

➤ Position rate

Application error rates are a given in the development process. Tracking error rates is important because they can indicate not only quality issues but also ongoing performance issues and uptime-related issues.

If sustained run times and error rates are high, this indicates common CI/CD challenges between development and operations teams.

➤ Infrastructure costs

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

➤ Team retention rate

It’s a well-known fact: when developers, or anyone for that matter, truly feels valued and valued, they stay.

When the team collaborates tacitly, retention is the inevitable result. On the contrary, they may feel uncomfortable if developers do not work well together, progress is slow, etc. Potential issues can be identified by looking at team retention rates.

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

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

From HR to operation and maintenance, the team can work better and achieve the final goal; establishing indicators 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 great advantages:

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

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

Developers can focus on solving business problems. A simplified CI/CD pipeline allows developers to truly focus on what matters, rather than letting problematic code, tedious manual operations, production issues and other matters distract their attention.

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

Attract and retain talent. The competition in the labor market is fierce, and DevOps talents are difficult to impress. Instead of saying “we value DevOps teams”, 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 respective duties and give full play to their strengths.

CI/CD deployment strategy

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

Submit code frequently;
Automate the build process;
Run tests in parallel and build a deployment pipeline;
Fail fast and move left, giving developers the skills and tools to accelerate without disrupting the overall process;
Use CI tools that allow you to get feedback quickly.

How to implement CI/CD in your organization?

Before implementing any software, it is key to identify what the business drivers are, and the same goes for adopting CI/CD, and all R&D stakeholders should be involved early in the implementation process. R&D staff should provide input as they will be the primary users of the product.

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

It is important to maintain consistency during the integration process. Perform unit testing, manual releases, and track metrics. Then decide what can and should be automated.