Managing and optimizing the software lifecycle is often a disjointed process, with developers and IT operations teams working in silos. This lack of coordination can introduce inconsistencies, errors, and vulnerabilities. Continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) helps to avoid these challenges.
CI/CD is more than just a cultural shift. It includes a set of best practices and automated tools to create a pipeline for continuously building, testing, monitoring, and releasing software. Doing so accelerates the innovation process and enhances collaboration between development and IT teams. Also, because continuous testing is involved, errors are found more quickly and software/code quality is improved.
Ultimately, CI/CD enables organizations to speed application development and effectively modernize existing applications.
The Evolving CI/CD Pipeline
There has been a sudden increase in enterprise use of CI/CD as companies realize the need to shift to cloud-like development and deployment, especially in light of the recent global pandemic, according to InfoWorld. Amid the uncertainty around return to work, organizations are exploring moving on-premises development work using CI/CD tools to the cloud.
Coinciding with this shift is the rise of container technology. Just as cloud computing has enabled the elasticity and scalability of significant resources needed to build and test workloads, containers employ an architecture that seamlessly packages all the services and components needed to run an application.
The focus on cloud-like or cloud-native development “has made CI/CD an essential foundation for deploying containers,” according to a whitepaper by Omdia, a research and analyst firm. The automated processes and practices that underpin CI/CD help improve the apps being built or re-architected in containers.
The critical link to make this magic happen is having a platform that ties together CI/CD and containers.
Enter Kubernetes. It’s an open-source system that orchestrates, at scale, a multitude of container tasks, such as managing virtual machine clusters, load balancing, network traffic distribution, and more.
Kubernetes and CI/CD Go Together
An enterprise-ready Kubernetes platform helps companies achieve the benefits of containers — agility, portability, security, and speed — with the practicality of CI/CD methodologies.
The right Kubernetes platform provides automated integration of workflows and solutions, as well as the functionality for developers to quickly scale on demand. In addition, it should be architecturally designed for immutability to limit the potential of cyber attacks.
For example, Red Hat OpenShift is a Kubernetes platform that offers out-of-the-box functionality to build a CI/CD pipeline that streamlines and automates container-based services. It enables developers to build applications seamlessly, securely, and consistently at scale, so they can be put into service faster and meet the needs of the business.
Red Hat OpenShift Pipelines provides a native CI/CD experience that is built for containers running on Kubernetes. It is based on Tekton, an open-source framework governed by the Continuous Delivery Foundation that enables teams to fully control and manage the application lifecycle.
OpenShift Pipelines allows companies to seamlessly create a developer experience for rapid build and use of CI/CD container pipelines, whether it’s for a new application or to re-architect an existing one. The interface simplifies management, so development teams can focus on innovating, rather than problem-solving.
For more information and to learn about how Red Hat OpenShift Pipelines enables success with containers, visit https://www.openshift.com/blog/cloud-native-ci-cd-with-openshift-pipelines