What is CI/CD? A Beginner's Guide

Posted on July 28, 2025

CI/CD stands for Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery/Deployment. These are essential practices in modern software development and DevOps. They help teams deliver code changes more frequently and reliably.

🔁 Continuous Integration (CI)

CI is the process of automatically building and testing your code whenever changes are pushed to the code repository. This ensures that new updates don’t break the existing system.

Key benefits:

• Detect bugs early
• Faster feedback loops
• Better collaboration among developers

🚀 Continuous Delivery / Deployment (CD)

CD is the practice of automatically delivering or deploying tested code to a staging or production environment. This reduces manual errors and makes releases faster and more predictable.

Delivery vs Deployment:

• Continuous Delivery – Code is ready to deploy, but you trigger it manually
• Continuous Deployment – Code is deployed automatically after passing all tests

🛠️ Common CI/CD Tools

• GitHub Actions
• GitLab CI
• Jenkins
• CircleCI
• Travis CI

If you’re learning DevOps, understanding CI/CD is one of the best steps you can take toward becoming job-ready!