CI/CD
Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery/Deployment — a set of practices that automate the building, testing, and deployment of code changes.
Definition
CI/CD combines two practices: Continuous Integration (automatically building and testing code on every commit) and Continuous Delivery/Deployment (automatically deploying validated changes to staging or production). A CI/CD pipeline typically includes stages for: code checkout, dependency installation, linting, testing, security scanning, building, and deployment. Popular CI/CD tools include GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Jenkins, and CircleCI.
Why It Matters
CI/CD reduces deployment risk by catching issues early and deploying smaller changes more frequently. Teams using CI/CD deploy 200x more often with 3x lower change failure rates according to DORA research. It enables rapid iteration and faster time-to-market.
Example
A developer pushes code to GitHub. The CI/CD pipeline automatically runs tests, performs security scanning with diffray, builds a Docker image, and deploys to staging — all within 10 minutes.