If you’re a product manager or deep into app development, you may have heard about continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD). But what are they, and more importantly, how do they impact your day-to-day work? You’ve got questions? We’ve got answers. Understand CI/CD and how they impact app development below.
Why Use Continuous Integration for App Development
With CI, code integration becomes automated and continuously integrates with your main branch through various checks on developer branches. As such, CI reduces app development costs and frees developers to work and experiment with code faster than conventional app development workflows. Additionally, CI becomes your first line of defense for quality assurance (QA). On average, CI reduces QA cycles by up to 50% – 60%. CI also reduces the likelihood of bugs being introduced into a production environment.
If you’re thinking about implementing CI into your app development process, consider the following:
- Build and package your app automatically every time updated code is pushed.
- Implement automated tests to ensure that any deployed application works as expected.
- Deploy your app into other environments before making its way into production.
- Run services such as SonarQube and Codacy to automate code quality and coding standards.
- Automate security tests to identify vulnerabilities in new code and dependencies with services like SonarQube, Veracode, and Snyk.
These five bullets oversimplify CI implementation but are a good starting point. CI saves time, money, and complexity in your app development process. For help implementing your CI, contact an app development team like Uplancer.
Common Continuous Integration Tools
If you’re considering implementing a CI pipeline for your dev team, you’ve got some options with popular tools, such as GitHub Actions, Jenkins, and CircleCI. As an AWS APN Partner, we recommend the following tools for implementing your own CI solutions:
- AWS CodePipeline – automates a CI pipeline.
- AWS CodeBuild – compiles source code and runs, tests, and builds software packages.
- AWS CodeDeploy – automates software deployments for AWS services.
- AWS CodeCommit – stores source code.
- Amazon CodeCatalyst – create, build, and deploy applications.
Not every CI service is designed for your app, so carefully review your options with your app development team or a CI expert like Uplancer.
Regardless, setting up a CI pipeline is a significant investment for any team. However, it does pay off once your application grows in functionality and complexity. CI is also a solid foundation for a more agile development team, which means faster deployments and more cost savings for your team.
Continuous Deployments, the Perfect Match for Continuous Integration for App Development
You’ll notice continuous integration and continuous deployment used together. Both are automation tools for app development. While CI is important for integrating your new code into your main repository, CD is crucial for deploying the latest repository to a production environment. In simpler terms, CI moves your code into a code repository, whereas CD makes your code live on the target environment, which could be dev, staging, or production.
When considering a full CI/CD implementation, ensure your CI system can run full checks on the deployed application. That means removing most, if not all, manual checks from your dev team. When it’s not possible, automating everything else you can is still beneficial for developing a large application. Like CI, CD launches your product faster and saves costs in the long run.
The Bottom Line
When your team is ready to take app development to the next level, CI/CD can help! Both automation techniques allow your team to quickly integrate new code and deploy the latest code to any environment. Investing in CI/CD pipelines initially can save money in the long run, allowing your team to reallocate resources to the more important parts of app development. Not all developer teams and projects are built the same, so choosing a CI/CD solution needs a deeper discussion.
Connect with Uplancer today for a free consultation on whether implementing a CI/CD solution is right for your organization and/or app development team.
