What Is CI/CD?

Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery/Deployment (CD), collectively

known as CI/CD, represent pivotal practices in modern software engineering. CI is the
process where developers regularly integrate their code changes into a central
repository. Each integration is then automatically tested and verified, promoting high-
quality code and early bug detection. On the other hand, CD takes this a step further by
automating the delivery of these tested code changes to predefined infrastructure
environments, ensuring seamless and reliable software updates. With this automated
build, testing, and deployment process, CI/CD practices enable teams to release
software faster and more reliably, making it a cornerstone of DevOps culture.
A CI/CD pipeline compiles incremental code changes made by developers and packages
them into software artifacts. Automated testing verifies the integrity and functionality of
the software, and automated deployment services make it immediately available to end
users. The goal is to enable early detection of defects, increase productivity, and shorten
release cycles.
This process contrasts with the traditional approach to software development—
consolidating multiple small software updates into one large release, thoroughly testing
it, and only then deploying it. CI/CD pipelines support the agile concept of development
in small iterations, enabling teams to deliver value to customers faster, and create a
rapid feedback loop for developers.
What Are the Differences Between Continuous Integration, Continuous Delivery, and
Continuous Deployment?
Continuous Integration
In the traditional software development process, multiple developers produce code, and
only towards the end of a release do they consolidate their work. This caused many
bugs and issues, which could only be identified and resolved after a long testing phase.
Until all those issues were resolved, the software could not be released. This hurt
software quality, and meant that teams could typically only release new versions once
or twice a year.
Continuous Integration (CI) was designed to solve this problem and support agile
development processes. CI means that any changes developers make to their code are
immediately integrated into the master branch of the software project. The CI system
automatically runs tests to catch quality issues, and developers get quick feedback and
can fix issues immediately. Developers often commit to the master branch or work on a
short-lived feature branch, and a feature is not considered complete until it is integrated
with other code changes in the master branch.
In a CI process, a build server is responsible for taking new code changes, running
automated tests using multiple tools, integrating the code into the master branch, and
generating a build—a new version of software artifacts needed to deploy the software.
CI greatly improves the quality and speed of software development. Teams can create
more features that provide value to users, and many organizations now release
software every week, every day, or multiple times a day.
Continuous Delivery
Traditionally, deploying new software versions has been a large, complex and risky task.
After the new version was tested, the operations team was tasked with deploying it into
production. Depending on the size of the software it could take hours, days or weeks,
requires detailed checklists and many manual steps, and special expertise. Deployments
often failed and required developer workarounds or urgent assistance.
There are many problems with this traditional approach—it is stressful for the team,
expensive and risky for the organization, and causes bugs and downtime in production
environments.
Continuous Delivery (CD, also known as CDel) aims to solve these problems through
automation. The CD approach allows teams to package software and deploy it to
production environments with the push of a button. The basic principle of CD is that any
change to a software project can be deployed to a production environment
immediately, without any special effort.
After the CI system consolidates the new changes and creates a new build, the CD
system packages the new version, deploys it to a test environment, automatically
evaluates its behavior, and pushes it to the production environment. This last step can
be manually approved, but no manual action is required to deploy the new version to
production.
Implementing CD requires automating the entire software development lifecycle,
including build, test, environment setup, and deployment. All artifacts must reside in a
source code repository, and an automated mechanism is required to create and update
the environment.
A true CD pipeline has great advantages. It allows development teams to deliver value
to customers quickly and create truly agile development processes.
Continuous Deployment
Continuous Deployment (CDep) goes one step further than continuous delivery. All
changes going through all stages of the production pipeline undergo automated tests,
and if these tests pass, they are immediately deployed to production and exposed to
customers.
Continuous deployment puts an end to release dates, and is a great way to speed up the
customer feedback loop and reduce stress on the team. Developers can focus on
building the software and see it running in production minutes after completion.
Continuous deployment can be difficult to implement. It requires seamless automation
at all stages of the process, robust automated testing suites, and a culture of
“continuous everything” that enables detection and rapid response to production
issues.
Learn more in our detailed guides to:
Software deployment
Continuous deployment
How Does CI/CD Relate to DevOps?
DevOps promotes better collaboration and communication between development (Dev)
and operations (Ops) teams. It often requires changing various aspects of the
development lifecycle, including job roles, tools, best practices, and automating the
lifecycle.
DevOps typically involves the following:
Adopting automation, programmable infrastructure deployment and maintenance, and
iterative software development.
Establishing cross-functional teams while facilitating a culture change to build trust
between these previously disparate teams.
Aligning technologies to business requirements.
CI/CD supports the efforts of DevOps teams. It enables teams to implement automation
across the development lifecycle and rapidly validate and deliver applications to end-
users. Here is how it works:
Continuous integration tools help initialize processes, ensuring developers can build,
test, and validate code within a shared repository without manual work.
Continuous delivery tools extend these automated steps to production testing and
configuration for release management.
Continuous deployment tools automatically invoke tests, handling configurations,
provisioning, monitoring, and rollbacks.
What Are the Stages of a CI/CD Pipeline?
The CI/CD pipeline performs continuous integration, delivery, and deployment in four
phases—source, build, test, and deploy.
Source
Creating source code is the first phase in a CI/CD pipeline. During this phase, developers
translate requirements into functional algorithms, features, and behaviors. Tools often
vary, depending on the project, the project’s language, and other variables. As a result,
there is no uniform source creation pipeline.
A source code creation pipeline may incorporate any of the following:
A programming framework, such as Java, .NET, C#, or PHP.
An integrated development environment (IDE) that supports the programming language
chosen for the project.
Code-checking tools, such as vulnerability scanners, basic error detection, and tools
verifying adherence to coding standards.
Code repositories and version control systems, such as Git.
Build
The build phase involves pulling source code from a repository, establishing links to
libraries, dependencies, and modules, and building these components into an
executable (.exe) file. It typically requires tools that can generate execution logs, denote
errors to correct and investigate, and notify developers once a build is completed.
Build tools vary according to the programming language. Some scenarios may require a
specific build tool, while others can employ the same IDE for both source and build
phases. A build phase may use additional tools to translate an executable file into a
deployable or packaged execution environment, such as a virtual machine (VM) or a
Docker container.
Test
During the source code creation phase, the code undergoes static testing. The
completed build enters the next CI/CD phase to undergo dynamic testing, including:
Basic functional or unit testing—helps validate new features work as intended.
Regression testing—helps ensure changes do not break previously working features.
In addition to functional and regression tests, the build undergoes tests that verify
integration, performance, and user acceptance. If errors occur during the testing phase,
the process loops these results back to developers for analysis and remediation. Since
builds undergo many tests, developers employ automated testing to minimize human
error and improve productivity.
Deploy
After a build passes the testing phase, it becomes a candidate for deployment. There are
two main ways to deploy the build, including:
Continuous delivery—the build is sent to human staff for approval and then deployed.
For example, new versions are automatically deployed to a test environment, but
promotion to production is gated by a manual approval or merge request.
Continuous deployment—the pipeline automatically deploys the build to testing,
staging, and production environments, assuming it passes all relevant tests, with no
manual approvals.
A typical deployment phase creates a deployment environment and moves the build to
a deployment target, like a server. You can automate these steps with scripts or
workflows in automation tools. Most deployments also integrate with error reporting
and ticketing tools to detect unexpected errors post-deployment and alert developers.
Learn more in our detailed guide to the CI/CD pipeline
Benefits of Kubernetes for CI/CD Pipelines
The secret to the success of a CI/CD pipeline is ensuring that application updates are
performed quickly and in an automated manner. Teams typically face the following
challenges when adopting CI/CD:
Manual steps in the release process—Many CI/CD processes still use manual testing and
deployment steps. This can cause delays and affect production schedules. Manual CI/CD
processes can cause code merge conflicts and increase customer wait times for patches
and updates.
Downtime risk—manual infrastructure management processes can be a headache for
DevOps teams because they create the risk of downtime. For example, unexpected
traffic spikes that exceed capacity can cause downtime and require manual steps to
restore applications.
Inefficient resource utilization—applications are often deployed on servers in an
inefficient way. This means organizations have to pay more for capacity. As applications
are added, scaled up and down, it can be difficult to efficiently use available hardware
resources. This is true whether the application is running in the cloud or on-premises.
Kubernetes can solve all three of these problems. It reduces the time and effort
required to develop and deploy applications in a CI/CD pipeline. Its efficient resource
management model increases hardware utilization, automates management processes,
and reduces disruptions that negatively impact customers. Specifically, Kubernetes can:
Cluster Management – Kubernetes takes the best practices for all previous clustering
solutions and packages them in a vendor agnostic way. It comes bundled with several
critical components such as schedulers and resource managers and contains plugin
mechanisms for storage, networking, secrets etc. Writing distributed applications with
Kubernetes is much easier compared to legacy clustering solutions as the environment it
offers is standardized and without any proprietary mechanisms to closed systems
Orchestrate deployment and provisioning—coordinating provisioning activities and
simplifying deployment. Kubernetes handles hardware and storage resource
configuration, software deployment, scalability, and health monitoring, and is fully
customizable for specific needs.
Declarative constructs—codifying the final state of the desired environment or
application in simple, human readable code. This makes it possible to recover faster
from downtime and production issues, better control scaling, and streamline disaster
recovery processes.
CI/CD in the Cloud
CI/CD in the cloud refers to the practice of using cloud-based services to perform
Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery/Deployment (CI/CD) of software. This
enables developers to build, test, and deploy their software faster and more efficiently
by leveraging the scalability, flexibility, and cost-effectiveness of the cloud.
CI/CD in AWS
AWS offers a suite of services specifically designed to facilitate CI/CD practices, enabling
developers to automate the software release process from code build to deployment:
AWS CodePipeline, a continuous integration and continuous delivery service,
orchestrates the workflow of pushing code through various stages of the release
process.
AWS CodeBuild compiles source code, runs tests, and produces ready-to-deploy
software packages.
AWS CodeDeploy automates the deployment of applications to any instance, including
Amazon EC2, AWS Fargate, AWS Lambda, and on-premises servers.
CI/CD in Microsoft Azure
Microsoft Azure facilitates CI/CD through Azure DevOps Services, offering a suite of
development tools for software teams:
With Azure Pipelines, teams can automatically build and test their applications to ensure
code quality and consistency.
Azure DevOps tooling supports multiple languages and platforms, including Windows,
Linux, and macOS, and integrates with GitHub and container registries like Docker Hub.
Azure DevOps also provides project planning, source code management, and reporting
tools.
Learn more in the detailed guide to Azure automation
CI/CD Tools
Here is a brief review of popular CI/CD tools.
Learn more about these and other tools in our detailed guide to CI/CD tools
Continuous Integration Tools
Popular CI tools include Codefresh, Bitbucket Pipelines, Jenkins, CircleCI, Bamboo, and
GitLab CI.
Codefresh
Codefresh is a comprehensive GitOps continuous integration toolset designed for
Kubernetes and modern applications. It is built from the ground up for flexibility and
scalability around Argo Workflows and Argo Events. It takes the best of the open source
toolset and provides essential enterprise features like a unified user interface, a single
pane for cloud-wide management, security validated enterprise-grade runtime, end-to-
end auditability, and cross-application single sign-on.
Bitbucket Pipelines
Bitbucket Pipelines is a CI tool that integrates directly into Bitbucket, a cloud-based
source control system. It lets you manage pipelines as code and deploy your projects to
production via CD tools. You can use Bitbucket pipelines to create pipeline definitions
and kick off builds.
Jenkins
Jenkins is an open source automation tool that provides plugins to help develop, deploy,
and deliver software. It is a server that lets developers distribute tasks across various
machines and perform distributed tests and deployments. The Jenkins Pipeline offers
several plugins to facilitate the implementation of a continuous integration (CI) pipeline.
Learn more in the detailed guide to Jenkins.
CircleCI
CircleCI is a CI tool that supports various container systems, delivery mechanisms, and
version control systems like Github. CircleCI can run complex pipelines with caching,
resource classes, and Docker layer caching. You can run this tool in the cloud and on-
premises.
Bamboo
Bamboo is an automation server for continuous integration that can automatically build,
test, integrate, and document source code to prepare apps for deployment. It offers a
simple user interface for CI/CD and various features, including automated merging and
built-in deployment support.
GitLab CI
GitLab CI is an open source CI tool. It lets you use the GitLab API to install and set up
projects hosted on GitLab. GitLab CI can help you test and build projects and deploy
your builds. It indicates areas that require improvement and lets you secure project data
using confidential issues.
Continuous Delivery and Deployment Tools
Popular CD tools include Codefresh, Argo CD, GoCD, AWS CodePipeline, Azure Pipelines,
and Spinnaker.
Codefresh
Codefresh is a modern GitOps software delivery solution powered by Argo with support
for advanced deployments like canary, blue-green, and experimental releases. It
provides comprehensive dashboards that offer visibility from code to cloud while
integrating with your favorite tools. A centralized dashboard gives insight into
deployments at scale while providing the security and support enterprises need.
Argo CD
Argo CD is a Kubernetes-native CD tool optimized for GitOps. It stores configuration in a
Git repository and automatically applies it to Kubernetes clusters, making it easy to
integrate with existing workflows. Argo CD can detect configuration drift, monitor
application health, and roll back unwanted configuration changes. It also supports
progressive delivery strategies like blue/green and canary deployment.
Learn more in our detailed guide to Argo CD
GoCD
GoCD is an open source CD tool that helps automate the entire build-test-release
process, including code check-in and all the way to deployment. It works with Git,
Subversion, Mercurial, TFVC (TFS), and Perforce, and has an open plugin ecosystem. It is
deployed on-premises.
AWS CodePipeline
AWS CodePipeline is a cloud-based CD service that helps model, visualize, and automate
software release steps and continuous changes. Notable features include release
process automation, establishing a consistent release process, and viewing pipeline
history details.
Learn more in our detailed guide to CI/CD in AWS
Azure Pipelines
Azure Pipelines is a cloud-based service that helps automatically build, test, and ship
code to multiple targets, through a combination of CI and CD mechanisms. It supports
many languages, including Python, JavaScript, and Go, most application types, including
Node.js and C++, and targets such as virtual machines (VMs), containers, on-premises,
and cloud platforms.
Learn more in our detailed guide to CI/CD in Azure
Spinnaker
Spinnaker is an open source CD platform for multi-cloud environments. It offers a
pipeline management system and integrates with many cloud providers. Spinnaker
provides a pipeline builder to automate releases, and lets you save and reuse existing
pipelines as JSON files. It supports Kubernetes and integrates with tools like
Prometheus, Datadog, and StackDriver.
GitHub Actions
GitHub Actions is a CI/CD tool from GitHub, the world’s most popular platform for
hosting and collaborating on software projects. GitHub Actions allows developers to
automate workflows directly from their GitHub repositories, making it convenient for
teams already using GitHub.
GitHub Actions allows developers to create custom workflows using simple YAML
syntax, and they can leverage a marketplace of community-contributed actions to
extend their workflows.
Learn more in our detailed guide to GitHub Actions
Harness.io
Harness.io is a CI/CD platform that emphasizes simplicity of usage. It offers a visual
interface for building and managing deployment pipelines and can automate various
CI/CD processes, such as canary deployments and rollback decisions. Harness.io
automatically verifies deployments in real-time to detect and mitigate issues before
they impact end-users.
Learn more in our detailed guide to Harness.io
Learn more about these and other tools in our detailed guides to CI/CD tools
CI/CD Security Risks
Supply Chain Attacks
A supply chain attack is a cyber attack that targets weak links in an organization’s supply
chain. A supply chain is the network of all individuals, organizations, resources,
activities, and technologies involved in creating and selling software products.
Modern software applications rely heavily on dependencies to provide their core
functionality. The software ecosystem relies heavily on CI/CD to publish source code and
binaries to public repositories. This allows attackers to bypass standard security
measures and directly attack the supply chain, infecting many applications and websites
simultaneously.
Insecure System Configuration
A CI/CD environment consists of several systems from various vendors. To optimize
CI/CD security, security teams must focus on the health and resilience of individual
systems and the code and artifacts flowing through the pipeline.
Like any other system that stores and processes data, a CI/CD system includes a variety
of security settings and configurations at the application, network, and infrastructure
levels. These settings have a significant impact on the security posture of a CI/CD
environment and its vulnerability to potential breaches. Attackers are on the lookout for
ways to exploit potential CI/CD vulnerabilities and misconfigurations.
Insecure Code
The demand for rapid software development and delivery has increased the use of open
source third-party integrations. Some teams may bring third-party integrations into their
deployments without properly scanning the source code for security vulnerabilities.
Such integrations could lead to vulnerabilities in the CI/CD pipeline. Developers may not
follow code security best practices, increasing the attack surface. Common code
vulnerabilities include user input vulnerabilities, buffer overflows, error handling errors,
and serialization issues.
Exposure of Secrets
Automated processes are a key component of any DevOps infrastructure. CI/CD
orchestration and configuration tools are increasingly being deployed into DevOps
processes to automate processes and facilitate rapid deployment of software releases.
However, CI/CD tools make extensive use of secrets (like passwords and API access
tokens). they access many sensitive resources, such as information from other
applications and services, code repositories, and databases. The more secrets you have,
the more difficult it is to securely store, transmit, and audit them.
Also, secrets are not only used for tool-to-tool authentication. In many cases,
confidential information must be provided during the build and deployment process so
that deployed resources can access it. This is especially important when deploying
microservices using the auto-scaling capabilities of tools like Kubernetes.
DevSecOps and CI/CD
DevSecOps is a philosophy and organizational culture that adopts security practices in
DevOps processes. It is also used to represent a continuous delivery, security-centric
software development lifecycle (SDLC).
Historically, security was seen as a secondary part of DevOps workflows. Information
security practices were applied at the end of the software development lifecycle (SDLC).
However, discovering security breaches at the end of SDLC can be very frustrating and
issues discovered at that stage are difficult and expensive to resolve. DevSecOps drives
security engagement as an active part of the software development lifecycle (SDLC)
from its earliest stages.
A typical DevOps pipeline includes stages such as planning, coding, building, testing,
release, and deployment. DevSecOps enforces specific security checks at each stage of
the DevOps pipeline:
Planning—during the planning phase, you create a plan that determines when, where,
and how to perform a security analysis and test your scenarios.
Coding—using linting tools and Git controls to secure passwords and API keys.
Building—using static application testing (SAST) tools to track defects in code before
deployment to production. These tools are specific to a programming language.
Testing—during application testing, using Dynamic Application Security Testing (DAST)
tools to detect errors related to user authentication, authorization, SQL injection, and
API endpoints.
Release—leveraging security analysis tools for vulnerability scanning and penetration
testing. These tools should be used immediately before deploying the application.
Deployment—after completing the above tests, the secure build is sent to production
for final deployment. Deployments should be monitored at runtime for undiscovered
security threats or vulnerabilities.
Edge Computing and CI/CD
Edge computing pushes data processing closer to where it is generated, minimizing
latency and reducing bandwidth use. Integrating CI/CD practices with edge computing
enhances the deployment process, ensuring that updates are rapid, reliable, and
consistent across multiple edge devices in a distributed network.
By deploying updates directly to edge nodes, applications can process data locally. CI/CD
pipelines enable the scalable deployment of software to edge devices, ensuring that
updates can be managed regardless of the number of nodes. Automated testing and
deployment processes ensure that software updates are vetted before being rolled out
to edge devices.
The CI/CD pipeline for edge computing involves these steps:
Commit: Developers commit code changes to a shared repository. This code can include
updates for both central and edge components of the application.
Build: The build phase compiles the code into executable artifacts suitable for the target
edge devices. This step may include cross-compilation for different hardware
architectures common in edge environments.
Automated testing: Tests include unit tests, integration tests, and performance tests,
tailored to validate the functionality and performance of the code on edge devices.
Deployment: This phase involves pushing updates to edge nodes. It requires
orchestration to manage the distribution of updates to potentially thousands of edge
devices, ensuring minimal disruption and rollback capabilities in case of failure.
Learn more in the detailed guide to edge computing
CI/CD for Machine Learning
CI/CD for machine learning (ML), also known as MLOps, integrates continuous
integration, delivery, and deployment practices into the machine learning lifecycle,
addressing unique challenges such as managing data versioning, model training and
evaluation, and deployment of ML models. This approach enables teams to automate
the testing, integration, and deployment of machine learning models, ensuring that they
can rapidly iterate on models and deploy them into production environments with
confidence.
In the context of machine learning, CI involves the automation of integrating new data
sets, model code, and experiments into a shared repository. This process includes
automatic testing of data quality, model performance, and reproducibility of
experiments. CD for ML extends this by automating the deployment of models to
various environments (development, staging, production) and managing the model
serving infrastructure. This ensures that models are reliably and efficiently updated or
rolled back based on continuous evaluation metrics.
Key aspects of CI/CD for ML include model versioning, which tracks different versions of
models and their associated data sets; automated model testing, which validates model
accuracy, bias, and performance against predefined thresholds; and infrastructure as
code (IaC), which manages the ML infrastructure in a reproducible manner.
CI/CD Best Practices
Here are a few best practices that can help you practice CI/CD more effectively.
Learn about these and other best practices in our detailed guide to CI/CD best practices
Build Only Once
Eliminate the practice of building the same source code multiple times. If you need to
build, package, or bundle your software, you only need to perform this step once and
promote binaries to the next stage of the pipeline.
Most successful CI implementations include the build process as the first step in the
CI/CD cycle, making sure that software is packaged in a clean environment. This
eliminates human error and reduces the chance of overlooked artifacts or incorrect
artifacts included by mistake. Also, any artifacts generated must be versioned and
uploaded to Git, to ensure that every time they are needed in the process, the same
version of the build is available.
Prioritize Automation Efforts
Organizations moving to automated processes often struggle to identify which
processes to automate first. For example, it is useful to automate the code compilation
process from scratch. It is a good idea to run automated smoke tests every time
developers commit new code. Unit tests are usually automated first to reduce
developer workload.
In most cases, you will automate functional testing before UI testing. Unlike UI tests,
which change more frequently, functional tests do not require frequent updates to
automation scripts. Consider all possible dependencies, assess their impact, and
prioritize automation as appropriate.
Learn more in the detailed guides to:
Unit testing
Unit testing frameworks
Release Often
A commercial release is only possible if the software is release-ready and tested in a
production-like environment. Therefore, it is best to add a step that deploys new
versions to a realistic pre-production staging environment, or to the production
environment itself alongside the current production version.
The following are release strategies that can help you deploy software to staging and
production environments with low risk:
Canary deployment—release the new version for some users, test their response, and if
it works well, roll it out to a larger population. If the test fails, roll back and repeat.
Blue/green deployment—run the current and new version of the software in two
identical production environments. Initially, the current version is live and the new
version is idle. Then traffic is switched over from the current version to the environment
containing the new version. This lets you test the new version on real user traffic, and if
something goes wrong, you can immediately roll back to the current stable version.
A/B Testing—A/B testing is a method used to test the functionality of an application,
such as changes to the user experience. Two or more versions of the application, with
small differences between them, are served to production users in parallel. Teams
observe how users interact with each version, and when one version is deemed
successful, it is rolled out to all users.
Make the CI/CD Pipeline the Only Way to Deploy to Production
Investing in building a reliable, fast, and secure CI/CD pipeline gives you confidence in
your build quality, but bypassing that process for any reason can hurt your efforts.
Requests to circumvent the release process often occur because changes are minor or
urgent—you should not give in to these requests.
Skipping automated tests runs the risk of production issues, but the problem does not
end there. It is much more difficult to reproduce and debug problems, and trace them
to specific build artifacts, because builds are not automatically deployed to test and
production environments.
Even if at some point a team makes an exception and skips the CI/CD process, it is worth
understanding the motive. Why was the request to skip the CI/CD pipeline made in the
first place? Talk to key stakeholders and identify if the process seems slow or inflexible
to them. You may need to make performance or process improvements to address
those concerns.
By remaining responsive to stakeholder requirements, and communicating the benefits
of the CI/CD pipeline, you can convince stakeholders and avoid disrupting the CI/CD
process due to urgent requests.
Clean Up Environments with Every Release
To get the most out of your testing process, it’s worth cleaning up pre-production
environments before each deployment.
If your environment has been running for a long time, it can be difficult to keep track of
all configuration changes and updates applied—this is known as configuration drift. This
means tests may not return the same results. Maintaining a static environment incurs
maintenance costs, slows down testing, and delays the release process.
By using containers to host environments and run tests, you can easily start and destroy
each newly deployed environment by scripting these steps using declarative
configuration (for example, Kubernetes YAML files). Instantiating new containers before
each deployment ensures consistency, and makes it easy to scale your environment to
test multiple builds in parallel.
Utilize Code Visualization Tools
Code visualization tools help developers and teams understand the structure and
dependencies within their codebase, making it easier to navigate complex systems and
optimize the CI/CD pipeline. Incorporating visualization into your CI/CD process allows
for the identification of potential bottlenecks, dependencies that could impact the build
process, and areas where code quality could be improved.
For instance, visualizing the dependency graph of your application can highlight circular
dependencies or unnecessary coupling between components, which, if addressed, could
simplify the build process and reduce build times. Additionally, visualizing the flow of
changes through the CI/CD pipeline can help teams identify stages where failures
commonly occur or where manual interventions are frequently required. Visualization
tools can also facilitate better communication among team members.