Exploring Best Practices and Modern Trends in CI/CD

Last Updated on August 21, 2024

Let’s start with statistics: continuous integration, deployment, and delivery is among the top IT investment priorities in 2023 and 2024. To be exact, according to GitLab’s 2024 Global DevSecOps report, it is on the 8th place (and security is the top priority!). However, it shouldn’t be surprising, as CI/CD practice brings a lot of benefits to IT teams – it helps to accelerate software delivery and detect vulnerabilities and bugs earlier.

In this blog post we are going to focus on CI/CD best practices and modern trends. But first, let us remind you a bit about what continuous integration and continuous delivery are.

What CI/CD actually is 

First of all, let’s agree that automation is one of the fundamentals of successful DevOps. One way to achieve it for your projects would be to implement CI/CD pipelines that meet the demands of modern software development. On a side note, many organizations that switched to DevOps had a breakthrough in terms of bridging the gap between development and operations. Now, since CI/CD is a key part of DevOps, let’s break it down! 

Continuous integration – keynote

By continuous integration, we mean the process of frequently and automatically integrating code changes into a shared source-code repo. In order to achieve successful CI, after merging the changes made to the application by the developer – they must be validated. That is done by automatically building the application and running a range of different automated tests. Usual testing includes unit and integration testing as they guarantee these new changes do not break the application. This way your testing is comprehensive as the approach not only covers the small individual functions and classes but also different modules which make up the whole app. The key benefit of this process is that you get to see if there is a conflict between old and new code very quickly and then you can simply resolve any bugs and errors frequently and save yourself some time. 

Continuous delivery & deployment – let’s break it down

On the other hand, continuous delivery is all about automatically delivering completed code to testing and development environments, among others. This way you can have an automated as well as consistent process for your code to be moved to the aforementioned environments. Then, we have continuous deployment. The changes that pass the testing phase will be automatically delivered to production, which then results in many production deployments.

According to Google Cloud and DORA’s 2023 State of DevOps Report, faster code reviews (a crucial component of CI/CD!) tend to have a 50% greater software delivery performance. Moreover, you can further boost your organization by employing a public cloud. It helps to improve infrastructure flexibility and, as the report states leads to a 22% increase in infrastructure flexibility and, therefore, improved organizational performance by 30% when compared to less flexible infrastructures. 

To put it simply, continuous integration is everything that happens before the code is completed and continuous development and deployment are the practices after the code has been already completed.

How CI/CD benefits your software development 

When it comes to software development, proper CI/CD gives you a number of advantages. These include the ability to easily merge code changes, detect bugs earlier, and reduce errors as well as quicker and more secure deploy.

Now, let’s look at the main advantages of continuous integration and continuous delivery for your dev team, organization and customers. So, you get: 

• increased developer productivity – CI/CD automates repetitive tasks such as testing, development, and deployment, and therefore allows developers to have more time for the primary objectives. 
• quicker deployment & faster time-to-market – frequent testing leads to earlier bug detection and earlier fixes, therefore since the time required for this is decreased, your time-to-market is decreased too. 
• better quality of your software – thanks to the incremental approaches in development you can find errors earlier. To simplify: deploy a partial build, test it, and integrate it in your iteration mean continuous improvement of the quality of your software. 

CI/CD trends and best practices

Well, finally let’s get closer to the topic:

No 1 – Early and frequent commits 

When you make changes to code, you should commit them to the version control system as soon as possible. By committing earlier developers get instant feedback thanks to the automated tests and/or team members, therefore, issues get fixed earlier! Another thing is the reduction of potential large bugs coming up. To avoid that, it is important to make small and incremental changes as they are more understandable as well as easier to review and test. When you make use of this approach, you can make sure that your project is continuously progressing and your source code is working properly. 

Here’s how you can optimize and improve the approach mentioned above:

• First of all, go for a trunk-based development model because changes can be quickly committed to a centralized master branch. This simplifies your deployment to production and minimizes any potential difficulties linked to merging changes. As the DORA and Google report outlines, trunk-based development is expected to improve your organizational performance by 12.8 times when it is supported by clear and detailed documentation, as opposed to cases with poorer quality of documentation. 
• Then, if you want your team to perform well, encourage them to commit daily by using available automation in order to guarantee regular and high-quality releases. Now, daily commits will improve the communication across the DevOps teams, which in turn will result in coordinating efforts and speeding up feature integration into production. This technique can lower the rate of mistakes being made and support continuous supply, and therefore increase total efficiency. 
• Finally, for successful CI/CD processes you will need collaboration from a variety of areas. This can include: developers, infrastructure engineers, security specialists, and operations teams. Effective coordination supports the CI/CD and enables you to deliver best-quality software. 

No 2 – Prioritize security

Build process needs protection! Due to the fast-paced nature of the CI/CD strategy, security is rather important here. Therefore, it is significant to adopt the security-first approach right from the beginning and set out what your security requirements are. Once that mindset is locked in, your needs are clearly defined, and you have your production environment thoroughly analyzed for potential vulnerabilities. Thus, you can introduce appropriate security measures.

Don’t forget to separate your CI/CD systems from other parts of your internal network, in order to guarantee they are being stored securely. Some of the things you could implement would be: multi-factor authentication (MFA), VPNs, secure backups and Disaster Recovery techniques, firewalls, and strict access controls. Think of this as building a stronghold for your source code, and having defence mechanisms in place in order to protect what is being built, before you even start the construction process. 

Other things you should consider in terms of prioritizing security and DevSecOps: 

• The principle of least privilege 
• Encryption (both in transit and at rest) 
• Proper error handling mechanisms 
• Input validation & output encoding – to prevent common attacks such as SQL injection or cross-site scripting
• Penetration testing 

No 3 – Test earlier in your CI/CD pipeline

Ideally, in terms of testing, it is best to detect and fix issues early in order to simplify the development process and improve the software quality. You should run tests at each stage of the development process, but remember to fix issues in a separate pre production environments; or if you are not eager to do that, at least test code locally before you merge it with the shared repo. 

Therefore, to avoid spending significant amounts of time on testing code’s quality after it has been deployed (e.g. you can make new features instead) and to prevent bugs in your pipeline you should test early and consistently. 

In addition, this process of testing involves a range of tests, so you can guarantee complete coverage:

• unit testing,
• integration or component tests,
• functional tests,
• GUI testing,
• performance and load tests,
• security testing,
• acceptance tests. 

No 4 – Use DevOps tools for better CI/CD 

Don’t forget about DevOps tools that automate and simplify different elements in your CI/CD pipeline. They are usually provided in the form of an application or as features. The main purpose of these tools is to automate manual operations, which will save you time and effort during integration, testing, and deployment of your code. 

Since there are lots of DevOps CI/CD tools available, you might find it difficult to choose tools that are the best option for you to meet the needs of your organization. Before you make a decision, you should first examine your requirements and the capabilities along with the features of each tool that you are considering. This may sound ambiguous but it is important to choose the tools that align with your priorities and objectives. Some of the key factors to take into account would be: supported programming languages and platforms, functionality, user-friendliness, scalability, and budget. 

No 5 – Automate the DevOps processes  

There is a range of processes that could and should be automated, for example, automated testing. To start off, create a thorough list of testing duties with a concentration on those ones that require no human interaction. Prioritize automating complex tests, since they have the greatest influence on pipeline efficiency. 

Now, do you want to automate the tests in your CI/CD pipeline? Then, we will outline two options for you. The first one is bots, which are specialized tools, designed for specific tests, like web or API testing.

The second option is wrappers. With this one you get greater control over your testing processes, but, at the cost of needing additional setup.

Your teams could create customized tests for the CI/CD pipeline by clearly specifying the steps of testing and then sequencing them. 

No 6 – Adopt microservices architecture 

The microservices architecture is the way to design software where your application is divided into smaller elements called microservices. Each component can function, be updated and scaled independently.

No 7 – Monitoring your pipeline

To improve your CI/CD processes you should monitor and review your pipelines regularly. Daily reviews may seem like a drag however over time, the amount of changes, tests, bugs and fixes piles up. So, regular checks will guarantee you informative insight into how your pipeline is performing. This way you can, for example, pinpoint what the most frequent cause of errors actually is. That’s a crucial functionality, as you will be able to implement changes in order to prevent the potential risks. 

There are monitoring tools out there to help you with the process. By integrating them into your workflow, you will get more detailed information regarding the fundamental causes of errors along with recurring failure patterns. And it will allow your development team to deal with them quickly. 

Bonus Best practice – adopt backup and DR practices

In the beginning of this blog post we said that security is a top priority in IT. Thus, it’s important to make sure that the source code is safe in any event of disaster. One of the best ways to do that is DevOps Backup with Disaster Recovery technology. While building your backup strategy, you should make sure that your backup follows the backup best practices, including the possibility to keep your backups in multiple storage locations and follow the 3-2-1 backup rule, backup automation, easy monitoring of your backups and management, in-flight and at-rest encryption with your own encryption key, different restore capabilities to address any event of failure.

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Conclusion

To sum up, CI/CD processes are an essential element in modern-day software development. Thanks to the automation it brings in, you can speed up production processes, be sure that all potential issues are resolved in a timely manner and deploy frequently.

Due to the digitized world that we live in, you have to pay attention to how you are managing your CI/CD pipelines, stay up-to-date regarding current modern trends, and pay attention to security as well as any arising cyberthreats.

Other related articles that you might find interesting: 

📌 Secure And Compliant CI/CD Pipelines With GitLab 
📌 Bitbucket CI/CD How To Widely Adopt DevOps Processes 
📌 GitHub CI/CD The Beginners Guide
📌 Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery with Jira Done Right (Advanced)