Designing a Modern CI/CD Pipeline

This lecture covers the principles and steps involved in designing a modern CI/CD (Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery) pipeline, applicable to various industries and applications.

Overview

• Importance of a modern CI/CD pipeline for software and DevOps engineers.
• Applicability across industries and application types.

Source Stage

• Objective: Retrieve code from a repository (e.g., GitHub, Bitbucket).
• Branch Protection:
  • Implement PR (Pull Request) reviews to protect the main branch.
  • Prevent direct code pushes to the main branch.
• Linting:
  • Use linters to check for syntax errors.
  • Implement GitHub actions to enforce linting checks.
  • PR cannot be merged if linting fails.
• Pre-commit Hook:
  • Run linting checks locally before code is committed.

Build Stage

• Objective: Compile code and build container images, prepare artifacts for testing and release.
• Container Images:
  • Preference for building Docker images first, then compiling code within them.
• Unit Tests:
  • Ensure basic functionality checks are in place.
• Code Coverage:
  • Check for 80-90% code coverage.
  • Fail the pipeline if coverage is below the threshold.

Test Stage

• Objective: Conduct heavy testing, particularly integration tests.
• Integration Tests:
  • Test application functionality (e.g., user actions in a social media app).
  • Manage dependencies and environment setups using Docker Compose or Kubernetes.

Release Stage

• Objective: Release the application for use across various environments.
• Image Registry:
  • Ship images to a registry (e.g., ECR).
  • Deploy images to QA, staging, and production environments.

Conclusion

• This pipeline represents Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery.
• Upcoming focus on Continuous Deployment and GitOps, integrating CI/CD with deployment pipelines.
• Future discussions on developer code pushes to automatic production deployment.

This lecture covered the foundational stages of designing a CI/CD pipeline with a focus on source control, building, testing, and releasing. Stay tuned for the next session on continuous deployment.