How to keep up with CI CD best practices GitLab

Due to its high value as a target, it is important to isolate and lock down your CI/CD as much as possible. If a build fails, developers need to be able to quickly assess what went wrong and why. Logs, visual workflow builders, and deeply integrated tooling make it easier for developers to troubleshoot, understand complex workflows, and share their status with the larger team.

Some tools specifically handle the integration (CI) side, some manage development and deployment (CD), while others specialize in continuous testing or related functions. Setting up a CI/CD pipeline isn’t a one-time task but a continuous process—one that requires careful planning, execution, and monitoring. From ensuring your network supports your CI/CD pipeline to lax authentication processes or other mismanagement issues that can create hiccups, organizations face several common hurdles when implementing a CI/CD pipeline.

Pipeline as code: An extension of CI/CD

These adaptations have birthed the CI/CD process and have been coupled with a focus on automating the testing process, including unit testing. Implement continuous monitoring of the CI/CD pipeline and the deployed applications. This includes logging, log analysis, and intrusion detection systems to detect and respond to security incidents in real time. Monitoring can help identify unauthorized access attempts, unusual behavior, and indicators of compromise. Integrate automated security testing tools, such as dynamic application security testing (DAST), into the CI/CD pipeline. These tools scan the application for vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, and other security issues, providing developers with timely feedback and enabling them to address security concerns.

• CI/CD is part of DevOps, which helps shorten the software development lifecycle.
• If your team is deploying daily or multiple times a day and your current testing practices take hours to run or are set to run overnight, your testing won’t be able to keep up with the deployments.
• CI/CD tools streamline the development workflow by automating code compilation, unit testing, and deployment tasks.
• This makes it much easier to continuously receive and incorporate user feedback.
• Treating code review as a best practice improves code quality, encourages collaboration, and helps even the most experienced developers make better commits.
• This is sometimes called an alpha or development release, and involves only a small base of well-informed testers and users.

Teams make CI/CD part of their development workflow with a combination of automated process, steps, and tools. CI/CD also helps reduce dependencies within teams, which means developers can work in silos on their features with the confidence that code will integrate without failing. The ability to integrate developers and processes through CI/CD can increase productivity and collaboration among teams working on a project, especially when application performance monitoring ci cd those teams are scattered geographically. After development teams determine how a portfolio will be aligned in a CI/CD model (that is, how a portfolio’s assets will be grouped), teams should make decisions about who will work where. Know which assets support each process and capability and group them accordingly. If none of the work has been done for a particular product feature, the group should start small—one capability at a time.

What is secure configuration?

Take advantage of user input by A/B testing features and experimenting with early versions of products with users. More complex pipelines have additional steps besides the four core ones, such as data synchronization, application and library patching, or archiving information resources. Smaller, more frequent software releases are less disruptive and are easier to troubleshoot or rollback in case of an issue. The team also has the ability to rapidly deliver new features, helping the company better meet customer needs. The decision to implement CI/CD should consider the project or organization’s specific needs, complexity, and constraints.

For teams that may not need to release updates as frequently in their workflow — such as for those building healthcare applications — continuous delivery is typically the preferred option. It is slower but offers another layer of oversight to ensure functionality for the end-users. CI allows developers to work independently, creating their own coding “branch” to implement small changes. As the developer works, they can take snapshots of the source code, typically within a versioning tool like Git. The developer is free to work on new features; if a problem comes up, Git can easily revert the codebase to its previous state.

What is continuous integration (CI)?

Synthetic monitoring is one of a few methods of monitoring for CI/CD pipelines. In a nutshell, synthetic monitoring is a monitoring technique in which engineers run scripts that simulate user transactions. Then, they monitor and analyze the transactions to determine how the application would respond if a real user initiated the same transaction.

MetricFire can help you ensure that this backbone is monitoring properly and you have complete insight into the software delivery pipeline. MetricFire specializes in monitoring systems and you can use our product with minimal configuration to gain in-depth insight into your environments. If you would like to learn more about it please book a demo with us, or sign up for the free trial today. The first is whether you want to use an open-source CI/CD tool versus a commercial one (it delivers the code) or build your own. An open source solution saves money, but there’s the risk that the developers may drastically alter the code or stop developing the product altogether. Commercial tools, on the other hand, usually offer strong support and have more predictable update cycles, but they can be costly and can offer less flexible integration.

How to (successfully) handle the CI/CD process

The team continuously delivers code into production, running an ongoing flow of new features and bug fixes. CI/CD enables development teams to deliver software updates more frequently and reliably. This Agile and DevOps practice grants companies the agility to keep up with business goals and customer needs. By embracing these CI/CD fundamentals, organizations can streamline their development processes, enhance code quality, accelerate time to market, and achieve greater efficiency and innovation.

Another option is using CI/CD with an infrastructure as code approach or serverless architecture to deploy and scale applications according to demand. Continuous Delivery focuses on releasing the code faster, but it does not define what will be released for production or when. Someone has to be responsible for accepting the new software releases and launching them to the public. Continuous delivery is a safer approach to working on apps that need to be polished and will be released to a large group of users.

More about DevOps

Knowing end users’ priorities, and which features deliver value to which audiences, helps teams focus on the most useful feature capabilities. This is the process of delivering the build to a run time environment for integration, quality assurance, or preproduction. In this phase, functional and performance tests are run against the application. In this first phase, developers merge their code changes with primary code repositories for their projects. Key DevOps metrics help you understand whether the team delivers value to users quickly and which stages of the pipeline need optimizations. Version control allows you to track code changes and revert to earlier deployments when necessary.

The fast-paced nature of CI/CD and the continuous integration of code changes can amplify security risks. Without proper security controls, vulnerabilities can propagate quickly through the pipeline, making them challenging to identify and mitigate. Additionally, the reliance on open source and third-party components within the CI/CD process introduces security risks into the software supply chain. These dashboards display the deployment frequency and state (success/failure) by application.

Cycle time

To take advantage of the benefits that CI provides, it is best to limit the number and scope of branches in your repository. Most implementations suggest that developers commit directly to the main branch or merge changes from their local branches in at least once a day. While keeping your entire pipeline fast is a great general goal, parts of your test suite will inevitably be faster than others. Because the CI/CD system serves as a conduit for all changes entering your system, discovering failures as early as possible is important to minimize the resources devoted to problematic builds. Save complex, long-running tests until after you’ve validated the build with smaller, quick-running tests.