Glossary
What is CI/CD?
CI/CD stands for continuous integration and continuous delivery. It's the practice of automatically building, testing, and releasing software every time code changes, so teams ship small, safe updates often, instead of big, risky releases rarely.
Continuous integration (CI)
CI means every code change is automatically merged, built, and tested against the rest of the codebase. If a change breaks something, the team finds out in minutes, not weeks later. This keeps the main branch always working.
Continuous delivery / deployment (CD)
CD automates the release itself. Continuous delivery gets every change ready to ship and lets a human approve the final push. Continuous deployment removes even that gate, every change that passes the tests goes live automatically.
What a CI/CD pipeline does
- Build, compile and package the application.
- Test, run automated unit, integration, and security checks.
- Release, deploy to staging and then production, often with automated rollback.
- Monitor, watch the release and alert on problems.
Why it matters
Good CI/CD means faster releases, fewer bugs reaching users, and quicker recovery when something breaks. It's a core part of DevOps and one of the fastest ways to make an engineering team more productive.
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