As consumers, we experience continuous integration and development every day, many times without even realizing. The apps we use and the websites we surf have little updates that make our experience just a little easier or more efficient. As technologists, the same can be done to improve both internal applications and those used by our clients.

Taking a Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) approach is not something that can or should be done without changes to processes, tools and platforms. At Keyva, we help our clients navigate the changes needed to get started, testing and going beyond the automation pieces. We work with development and operational teams to collaborate on the technologies, practices and priorities, then develop consensus on the right approaches for their business and tools.

In a perfect scenario, an organization would benefit from developers pushing code to their code repository, which in turn gets validated and checked via quality gates set up by the pipeline, run automated testing, and then be available for a merge request. Upon code merge to main branch, using GitOps, the new code would be deployed into lower (non-production) environments where it would go through integration testing and user acceptance testing. A well-defined promote-to-production process would move the code into production branch, and it would be deployed automatically using stringent security protocols. Although this scenario requires considerations in how an organization handles internal team structures and processes, it is important to emphasize that leveraging CI/CD processes can dramatically improve the quality of code, reduce the amount of time it takes to go from development to production, and provide a much better user experience for your applications.

CI/CD processes help solve tangible business problems as concerns infrastructure and application development. For example:

• Increase your time to market: Improve the speed of your application releases and be more agile in delivery of new features for an better user experience.
• Reduce risk: Minimize the chance of unexpected impact to business with large updates. Smaller and frequent updates carry lower risk, and are easier to roll back if necessary.
• Catch bugs: Continuous Integration helps figure out any bugs in the code during the smaller merge processes, and fixes defects earlier in the cycle. This enables more stable code for production releases.

Our clients have looked to our expertise in CI/CD for a variety of reasons, including:

• Getting started with Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery – what is needed? Why? What are the benefits for my specific company?
• Determining the appropriate tools and platforms
• Developing an automation pipeline and effectively testing and using automated validations
• Educating on CI/CD best practices and knowledge transfer for future automation