Engineering
CI/CD
Also called
- Continuous integration
- Continuous deployment
- Pipeline
Continuous integration means every change is merged and tested frequently rather than accumulating on a branch for weeks. Continuous deployment means the tested change reaches production through automation rather than through a person following a document.
The point is not speed for its own sake. It is that deployment stops being an event. When releasing is a scheduled, stressful, all-hands operation, teams batch changes to reduce how often they do it — and large batches are exactly what makes releases risky. Automation inverts the loop.
It also changes what a rollback costs. If the only path to production is the pipeline, then going back is running the pipeline against the previous commit, which takes minutes and no heroics.
Teams with a working pipeline ship small changes daily and recover from a bad one in minutes. Teams without it ship large changes monthly and recover overnight.
Commonly misunderstood
What people get wrong
The claim
“We'll set up CI/CD once the project is stable.”
What is actually true
Retrofitted pipelines are the line item that gets cut under schedule pressure, every time. Set up in week one it costs a day; set up in month nine it costs a fortnight and rarely happens.
Where this comes up
Services where it matters
Related terms
Next step
Working through a ci/cd decision?
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