My intention isn’t to dissuade projects from implementing CI/CD pipelines—quite the opposite. No project can hope to innovate, survive, and scale in a competitive market without a reliable deployment and integration strategy.
What is a CI/CD pipeline?
The traditional Software Development job function email list Life Cycle (SDLC) looks something like this:
- Planning
- Implementation
- Testing
- Documentation
- Deployment and maintenance
SDLC has been the industry standard for over 60 years (and counting). It started in the 1960s as a means to develop large-scale functional business systems. And the methods initially developed for each stage have remained similar throughout the years.
As effective and reliable as those methods are, it’s hard to disagree that they are a product of their times. Both processing power and data transmission were extremely limited 60 years ago. Integration took time and effort, deployment was done on-site, and testing required dozens of hours manually checking for errors.
What are the benefits of a CI/CD pipeline?
Machines are faster than humans this article is a guest contribution by on almost every level, therefore automation tends to be synonymous with speed. The biggest benefit you can draw from a thought-out pipeline is faster development and delivery times.
Let’s say that you have a setup in which all developers have to integrate their code to a Git repository every 24 hours. Since you are delivering in smaller chunks, it’s easier to review the code and find bugs early in the process.
Now imagine that instead of having every piece of code manually reviewed by a project manager, you have an AI that automatically spots errors.
The hurdles of implementing CI/CD pipelines
If you are liking the sound of a CI/CD pipeline, then you are not alone: the adoption of the DevOps culture is on the rise. But there are a few caveats.
First, creating a fully automated CI/CD saudi data pipeline requires a certain set of skills. Some of them can be learned by any software developer, but having a DevOps engineer on your team is almost a necessity.
Finding a good DevOps specialist isn’t difficult, but it is expensive. In fact, DevOps is one of the highest-paid positions in the technology field. Additionally, in most cases, other developers will have to be trained to adapt to the specifics of your pipeline.