CI vs. CD Explained by Emoji: Part 1, Continuous Integration

Technological change this century is expected to accelerate at a rate most of us will find shocking. DevOps principles and culture are the de facto standard for innovative businesses. For DevOps to be effective, it must be paired with specialized tools, which is why continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) has become another driving force for change. But confusion remains about what CI/CD means, the differences between CI and CD, and how they are implemented.

CI/CD covers the software lifecycle from when a developer commits code 🧀🍅🥓🍍 to when that code is released into production. If CI/CD were a pizza delivery business (because why not), it would cover the entire process from putting all the ingredients together for making a new pizza recipe 📃, cooking it, checking its quality, through to delivery to someone’s door.

Admittedly, in this pizza analogy, our “CI/CD Pizza (Git)Hut Company” would be the Amazon of pizza delivery. The company would be working at scale and highly automated. It would have an industrial R&D kitchen with a team of chefs throwing together different ingredients, concocting new recipes and cooking pizzas at a rapid rate every day. Each pizza created from a recipe would be run through rigorous QA testing and verification tests, conveyed along automated belts, boxed and swiftly delivered out the back of the store as piping hot pizza to hungry customers. Essentially, what this tells you about CI/CD is that it thrusts products into production much faster after thorough testing and leaves legacy companies in the dust.

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