How to improve your delivery with CI/CD

Shipping great products faster is every tech team’s goal — but speed without control can cost you. In this guide, we break down how modern CI/CD pipelines help you deliver quality code quickly, keep standards high, and give your developers the guardrails they need to work smarter — not just harder.

One of the biggest challenges tech companies face nowadays is shipping quality products as fast as possible. This means that developer teams need to be able to code, build, test, and deploy those changes in a way that seamlessly integrates with their processes. This is where your DevOps team can leverage their tools to make this process as fast as possible with continuous integration & continuous delivery pipelines (CI/CD). However, oftentimes we see that delivery speed negatively affects quality: given the urge to deliver, tests are skipped, validations are deemed voluntary, and then time is spent trying to figure out how that critical bug was pushed into production. Therefore, there is another requirement for your CI/CD: they need to have the correct guardrails to detect flaws and act upon these detections: is there a sensitive value hardcoded? Fail and send a notification. Is there any test that should have passed and failed instead? Force the failure of the pipeline. Thus, CI/CD pipelines help your team move faster while enforcing standards.

CI/CD Stages

The basic CI/CD pipeline has the following stages:

Source: This is usually also referred to as the version control stage, and is where the developers work and your ideas live in raw form. Could be any kind of repo: GitHub repo, GitLab repo, Azure DevOps repository, AWS CodeCommit (for those that still haven't moved away from this service), Bitbucket—you name it.

Build: In this stage, the code is compiled and transformed into artifacts that can be deployed. This deployable artifact could be anything like binaries or container images, for example.

Deploy: After the code has been transformed into an artifact, the deployment stage does exactly what its name suggests: deploys the artifact where you have selected. The artifacts could be deployed in almost infinite ways: could be serverless if leveraging functions, could be deployed as containers in its many different flavors (Kubernetes, containers running in virtual machines, etc.).

Now you're probably asking, where is the testing stage? Where should I put the validation step? You probably want all stages to have some kind of tests in order to proceed to the following. Let's dig into the following sample for better understanding. Your developer has just created a pull request to add a new feature. The pull request should be blocked if the build validation didn't finish successfully. Your code has been correctly built—awesome! Before deploying it, you should verify that no critical vulnerabilities are detected. Not having detected any critical vulnerabilities, your code has been deployed. Does it behave as expected? In summary, where you place your tests and how you execute them will depend mostly on your requirements. However, keep in mind that they do come with a tradeoff in time: some tests may take longer than others, and you might consider if you're willing to wait those extra minutes or not.

CI/CD Guardrails

When implementing a CI/CD process, you need to define whether it will be fully automated or some manual validations will be required. If so, you will need to define who is responsible for those manual validations. Some questions to have for guidance:

• How many approvals does a pull request need to be merged?
• Who can merge that pull request?
• Who can bypass validations and how?
• Who can deploy into production?

Taking these questions into consideration before creating the pipeline also helps set the correct permission boundaries and implement the correct configuration. Just bear in mind that if you're overly restrictive, you might be giving yourself a headache: imagine having to deploy into production but the one in charge of the process is not available and no one else knows how to do it or doesn't have sufficient permissions. Make sure that there are at least two or more people who can handle the manual events, and that the process is detailed enough so as to minimize the possibility of human errors.

CI/CD Tools

Tools for implementing CI/CD pipelines are varied, with options ranging from open-source to enterprise solutions. Some of the most well-known include:

• Jenkins: Versatile, open-source CI/CD tool with extensive plugin ecosystem and self-hosted flexibility. 
• Azure DevOps: Microsoft's comprehensive DevOps platform offering integrated repositories, pipelines, and deployment tools. You will need a licence to set up your AzDevops pipelines
• GitLab: Complete DevOps platform with built-in CI/CD, source control, and project management capabilities
• GitHub Actions: Native CI/CD solution integrated directly with GitHub repositories, offering workflow automation
• AWS CodePipeline: Amazon's managed CI/CD service that integrates seamlessly with other AWS services. Its documentation provides a sample on how to configure a four-stage pipeline which funnily enough, uses Jenkins to build the artifact (see the doc here)

The choice depends on your team's specific needs, existing infrastructure, budget, and technical requirements. Open-source solutions like Jenkins offer maximum customization, while cloud-native options usually provide easier setup and maintenance with built-in integrations. All of them have their pros and cons, and you'd want to investigate them to verify that they adapt to your current and future requirements. If unsure which one adapts best to your business, you can always rely on your DevOps team to provide an assessment given that CI/CD is an essential part of DevOps practices. 

CI/CD Benefits

As you probably guessed, implementing CI/CD pipelines in the right way is no easy task. The good news is that the benefits of having a continuous integration and deployment process impact positively not only on the quality of your products, but on the overall performance of your team. A research of 2016 published by Dora summarizes the benefits in the image below:

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Conclusion

Though correctly configuring a CI/CD pipeline is hard work, the long-term benefits are worth it. The investment in automation, testing, and deployment infrastructure pays dividends through improved code quality, faster delivery cycles, and reduced manual errors.

If you're just beginning your CI/CD journey, start by implementing the pipeline step by step: first automate the building process and its validations, then move forward to automating the deployment process with its checks. This incremental approach allows teams to learn and adapt without overwhelming existing workflows.

If you already have CI/CD pipelines in place, look forward to optimizing them: optimize the timings by parallelizing tasks where possible, add comprehensive monitoring to catch issues early, configure automated remediation for common problems, and continuously refine your testing strategies. Regular pipeline maintenance ensures your CI/CD remains efficient and reliable as your codebase and team grow.

Remember that CI/CD is not a one-time implementation but an evolving practice that should adapt to your team's changing needs and industry best practices.

If you’re unsure what your next step should be, we’re here to guide you through it. Whether you’re starting from scratch or looking to optimize what you already have, our team can help you design, implement, and maintain robust CI/CD pipelines that accelerate delivery without sacrificing quality.

Let’s work together to build a development process that keeps your releases fast, secure, and resilient — now and as you grow. Reach out to us to get started.

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