CI/CD vs. DevOps: Understanding 8 Key Differences

1. Definition

CI/CD entails the continuous automation and monitoring of the application lifecycle–from integration and testing to the delivery and deployment of the product.

The implementation of CI/CD practices, also known as ‘establishing a CI/CD pipeline’, is a workflow best practice for DevOps teams to follow.

Organizations rely on CI/CD pipelines to minimize bottlenecks in the software development and delivery process. While continuous integration optimizes building, integrating, and testing code within a development environment, continuous delivery deals with effective production deployment.

DevOps emphasizes effective integration, communication, and collaboration among development and operations teams, driving them to focus on the delivery of high-quality products.

DevOps methodologies help organizations set up their production teams and processes to create software in a way that encourages rapid, continuous deployment.

At its core, DevOps advocates minimizing waste and the creation of systems that scale easily and last long.

2. Scope

Traditionally, integration is a costly activity that requires lots of back-and-forth among different engineering teams. To address this challenge, continuous integration drives the adoption of automation tools for testing and building.

The ultimate goal of such automation is the creation of a software-defined lifecycle. Successful CI means minimization of integration effort, allowing teams to spot and fix integration errors quickly.

Just like CI optimizes building and testing processes, continuous delivery (CD) boosts the efficacy of packaging and deployment activities.

Teams that adopt CD can design, build, package, and deploy software in a manner that enables software-defined production, which minimizes cost and maximizes automation.

When implemented correctly, CI/CD enables the frequent delivery of software changes to production. This gives users more opportunities to share feedback, thereby embracing a culture of agile development.

The aim of DevOps is to break down the barriers between engineering and operations teams through cross-training and fluid communication channels.

These principles improve collaboration and communication levels and give these teams a working idea of each other’s processes and functions.

3. Purpose

This process ensures complete development of the product and thoroughly prepares it for deployment.

The key purpose of CI/CD is to enable swift, efficient, and automatic rollout of product updates. This process also mitigates product defects, thus boosting average user satisfaction levels.

Essentially, a sturdy CI/CD pipeline increases ‘quality at speed’, adds value for operational and product development teams, and enhances business value for the enterprise.

The communication gap and lack of cooperation among these equally-important teams are likely to lead to development challenges due to insufficient collaboration.

The purpose of DevOps is to merge development and operations functions and bring together the processes that take place throughout the production cycle.

DevOps drives a more agile, streamlined, and efficient software production process. Its goal is to develop and maintain a common, shared culture between teams, thus implementing shared business processes and enhancing collaboration levels.

Simply put, a strong culture of DevOps helps teams achieve common business goals instead of siloed departmental objectives.

4. Process

These changes are validated through the creation of a build that is subjected to automated tests. This process helps teams avoid the challenges that would arise if they wait for the release day to integrate changes.

Continuous integration also emphasizes automation of testing for detecting bugs and performance issues whenever new code is integrated.

The continuous delivery process is an extension of continuous integration. It entails the automatic deployment of all code updates during the testing and production stage.

With continuous delivery, teams enjoy automated testing and release processes and can deploy the latest application build with the tap of a button.

• Automation of all aspects of development, such as workflows, testing of new code, and provisioning of infrastructure to reduce overwork and waste.
• Iterative development, or the writing of small pieces of code within a fixed time with an aim to drive releases and sub-releases and enhance the frequency and speed of deployments.
• Continuous improvement by constant testing, acting on feedback, and learning from failures to optimize cost, performance, and time to deployment. 
• Uniting teams, breaking down silos, and fostering communication between IT operations, development, and quality assurance.

Continuous testing, monitoring, and feedback implementation, followed by smaller but more rapid deployments, are the defining feature of the DevOps process, and allows enterprises to successfully bring developers, IT teams, and end users closer to each other.

5. Implementation

Jenkins must be correctly configured with the needed dependencies before it can be implemented. The following steps can help your IT personnel implement Jenkins in a Windows environment, thereby creating a CI/CD pipeline for your team:

• Step 1: Log in to Jenkins and choose ‘New Item’.
• Step 2: Choose ‘Pipeline’ from the menu, give the pipeline a name, and click on ‘OK’.
• Step 3: Configure the pipeline by setting up build triggers and other options. The ‘Pipeline Definition’ section allows you to define the pipeline stages. You can use declarative as well as scripted syntaxes when setting up the pipeline. Once done, click on ‘Apply’ and ‘Save’.
• Step 4: Choose ‘Build Now’ to execute the pipeline. After the execution of the pipeline stages is complete, the result can be viewed in the ‘Stage View’ section. Check the build’s console output to verify the successful execution of the pipeline.
• Step 5: You can expand the pipeline definition through the addition of more stages. To do so, choose ‘Configure’ and modify the pipeline definition. To execute the new pipeline, save your changes and choose ‘Build Now’. Each new stage can be checked in the ‘Stage’ view after successful execution. Check the console logs to verify that the execution of the code went as expected.
• Step 6: Use the ‘Pipeline timeline’ plugin to optimize the visualization of the pipeline stages. Once the plugin is installed, the ‘Build Timeline’ option can be found inside the build stage. Choosing this option will show you a timeline of pipeline events.

Once a CI/CD pipeline is successfully implemented in Jenkins, expand it by integrating test frameworks, external code repositories, and deployment strategies.

Aim to implement DevOps principles in stages to ensure minimum disruption and maximum benefits. This can be achieved by following these steps.

• Step 1: Begin by establishing an agile development process.
• Step 2: Adopt cloud computing for all relevant processes and implement a CI/CD workflow.
• Step 3: Automate software deployment and testing processes.
• Step 4: Adopt continuous deployment.

DevOps automation requires a shift in infrastructure and tools, without which, gaps might emerge in the DevOps process flow.

A true DevOps environment is automated and agile at every stage of the development pipeline.

A visual approach to mapping out DevOps processes allows IT teams to understand process flows, timelines, and the tasks assigned to each resource. Visuals make the implementation process seamless by ensuring that everyone is on the same page right from the beginning.

6. Stages

Each stage must be completed successfully before the next one can commence. Every stage is continuously monitored for discrepancies to ensure an error-free process. Feedback is conveyed to the delivery team in case an error is detected.

1) The source stage comes at the beginning of the CI/CD pipeline. It is responsible for triggering actions such as unit testing and code compilation. The action is triggered once a change (such as a commit or a new version) is detected either in the program or in the central code repository.

This stage covers source control and version control and is responsible for tracking changes. Tools commonly used in the source stage include SVN, GIT, AWS CodeCommit, and Azure Repos.

2) Next comes the build stage where the source code is infused with its dependencies and an executable development instance is created. Software builds, build artifact handling, and other variants of buildable objects, like Docker containers, are handled in this stage. If a build fails at this stage, it might indicate a fundamental problem with the code.

Users can centralize the storage procedure of building artifacts through a consolidated artifact repository such as JFrog or Yarn. Azure Artifacts and other cloud-based solutions can also be used. This enables users to revert to the previous build version in case any problems arise in the current one. Tools such as Gradle, Jenkins, AWS Code Build, Azure Pipelines, and Travis CI support the build stage.

3) The test stage covers automated testing and validates software behavior with an aim to prevent bugs from reaching users. This stage covers multiple types of testing, including functional testing and integration testing. Errors with the product are also highlighted in this stage. The test tools commonly used in this stage include Appium, Selenium, PHPUnit, Jest, Playwright, and Puppeteer.

4) A package that passes the first three stages is ready for the deployment stage.

First, it will be deployed in a staging environment for quality assurance, after which, it will be deployed for end users in a production environment. The deployment stage can be used for all types of deployment strategies, including canary deployments, blue-green deployments, and in-place deployments.

This stage includes the provisioning, containerization, and configuration of infrastructure using tools such as Puppet, Terraform, Kubernetes, Docker, AWS Code Deploy, AWS Elastic Beanstalk, and Azure Pipelines – Deployment.

, as well as numerous other stages.

1) The continuous development stage covers planning and software coding. Stakeholders collectively decide the vision of the project in this stage, after which the development of the application code can begin.

2) The continuous integration stage includes the development of code for new functionality being built and integrated with the existing code. This integration takes place either daily or weekly. Once all the commits are built, problems can also be detected early in this stage.

This stage involves compilation, integration testing, unit testing, packaging, and code review.

3) In the continuous testing phase, the software is continuously tested for bugs using automated tools such as JUnit, TestNG, and Selenium. Quality analysts use these tools to complete the thorough testing of multiple code-bases parallelly and ensure that no functionality flaws exist.

In this stage, Docker containers can be used to simulate the testing environment.

Once the tests are completed, a report is generated automatically. The new code can then be continuously integrated with the existing build code.

4) The continuous monitoring stage covers all the operational factors of the DevOps process. Records pertaining to the use of the software are created and processed to spot trends and detect problems. Usually, the operational capabilities of the application are infused with automated monitoring features to create a truly continuous process.

Output is generated in the form of big data or numerous documentation files. System errors such as “low memory” and “server not reachable” are addressed in this stage, bolstering the availability and security of the application.

5) The continuous feedback stage ensures the continuous improvement of the application. This is achieved through an analysis of how the software is operated. By setting up a mechanism for the continuous collection of feedback during the day-to-day operations of the application, developers can improve its next version more effectively.

6) The deployment of the code to the production servers takes place in the continuous deployment stage. This stage also covers the correct usage of the code on all servers.

Configuration management tools such as Ansible, CFEngine, and Chef are essential for executing tasks quickly and frequently in this stage. Containerization tools such as Docker and Vagrant help scale up and down instances softly, as well as ensure consistency across development, staging, testing, and production.

7) Finally, the continuous operations stage ensures continuity through the end-to-end automation of the release process. The successful implementation of this stage allows enterprises to accelerate time to market by running their application on two servers, with one live and the other for DevOps.

This system minimizes downtime during the deployment of a new implementation (and even otherwise). How? In case of downtime on one server, users are simply routed to the other server.

7. Benefits

• Fewer bugs reach production due to automated testing.
• Simplification of the release building process, as integration issues are addressed early on in the cycle.
• Minimized requirement for context switching, as developers receive alerts as soon as the build is broken. This enables them to begin fixing it immediately.
• Reduction in testing costs, as CI servers can execute hundreds of tests within seconds. This gives the QA team more time to focus on higher-value tasks.
• Minimization of complexity in software deployment, as teams do not have to invest multiple days in their preparation for release.
• Increase in release frequency, which accelerates the efficacy of the end-to-end feedback loop.
• Ease of decision-making when it comes to the implementation of small changes, which speeds up the iteration process.

• Enhanced agility, automation, collaboration, efficiency, and quality.
• Early detection and addressal of errors and bugs.
• Minimized time to market.
• Enhanced ROI.
• Improved user satisfaction.
• Reduced risk of misalignment and miscommunication.

Agile practices, when integrated with automated testing and continuous feedback, accelerate development and ensure the swift detection and management of bugs. With correct implementation, DevOps processes result in higher quality products, happier users, and increased profits.

8. Use Case

For instance, ReactJS is a widely used JavaScript framework. Developed and maintained by Facebook (now Meta), it is a good example of a sturdy CI/CD pipeline. Each time a Pull Request is submitted by a contributor, CircleCI builds and tests the latest version of ReactJS. The test results can be viewed by all users of the framework.

CircleCI is created to power a Bitbucket or GitHub CI/CD pipeline. Every change made in the code repository initiates a testing job. These tests run on a virtual machine or in an isolated container.

CircleCI is also used by other open source projects, including Flow, StoryBook, Relay, Yarn, and Angular.

Meta constantly experiments and improves its product development approach, which has matured significantly over time. Its development team has applied DevOps practices such as incremental changes, code ownership, continuous improvement, and automation.

In 2015, Meta (then Facebook) migrated its complete infrastructure and back end to the Chef Configuration management platform. This has enabled the company to manage numerous servers and multiple code updates daily.