# Development

Key Benefits of Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment

Red Rocket TeamJan 27, 20254 min read

Fundamental Principles of Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment How Does Continuous Integration Work? Key Advantages of Continuous Integration How Automated Testing is Integrated Into CI Pipelines How Combining CI and CD Accelerates Deployment Cycles Tools and Technologies That Enable Fully Automated CI Pipelines Final Thoughts

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It's no secret that there are a lot of terms for specialists in the information technology and development industry. They often use them among themselves to save time. Some of them look quite unclear to business owners. For example, in the developer community, you may often come across such concepts as CI and CD. What are these?

Simply speaking, these are approaches that involve continuous integration of changes to the code base and further product deployment. One of the most popular questions of newcomers is «how does continuous integration work?». In this article, we want to review the basic principles of continuous processes, their features, benefits, tools, and technologies. Our guide will help you learn how to increase efficiency, reduce vulnerabilities, and improve the security of your development processes.

Fundamental Principles of Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment

Developers often face common challenges during software development and updates. To improve efficiency, many professionals follow proven practices for deploying digital products. Such are continuous integration and deployment. Let's talk more about their basic principles that everyone should know!

What is continuous integration? This is a well-known practice among developers when experts add all code changes to a common repository. In other words, all integration processes happen continuously, which ensures better efficiency.
What is continuous deployment? This is a stage that is usually a consequence of continuous integration code. All changes to the code base are automatically tested and prepared for deployment. In this way, software or application users receive updates faster.

These approaches have fundamental principles that optimize the development process and improve product quality. For example, the first thing you need to know about is frequent code commits, ensuring that developers integrate changes into the main branch several times daily. These practices help reduce merge conflicts and provide quick feedback on code performance. Automatic testing is another core principle. Running unit, integration, and functional tests automatically with every commit to CI/CD pipelines, new changes do not break pipelines.

How Does Continuous Integration Work?

Continuous Integration (CI) is a way of streamlining development and reducing integration issues by automating code update tests and by building the code. The standard CI pipeline starts from the fact the developer creates some new code or changes the existing code and adds it to the version system. This starts the CI pipeline, which does some actions to ensure code quality and compatibility.

The merging of the latest code base from the repo with the newly committed changes to create a single build that’s a representation of where the project is at in terms of state right now is the first step in the CI pipeline. Right after this, the code is compiled, and an executable format is used to build automation. It does this step to identify configuration issues before they have started.

Then, the pipeline reruns a set of automated tests like unit tests checking individual components, integration tests to make sure all parts fit together, and functional tests to what it would look like in real-world use cases. Developers get immediate feedback when a build succeeds. When it fails at least one test, the build is flagged as broken, and developers are nudged to fix problems before the next set of changes is merged.

In order to have a successful code integration strategy, you must keep a reliable set of tests, you must build the same code environments consistently, and you need to encourage collaboration among team members. This process becomes simpler with CI tools such as Jenkins, GitLab CI, and CircleCI in place that automate the repetitive tasks so that developers can concentrate on delivering new features rather than resolving conflicts.

The benefits to development teams of following a structured CI workflow as part of an automated delivery pipeline have been outlined above — early issue detection and resolution, avoidance of integration conflicts, and stable software that evolves. Continuous integration is an essential part of modern agile because it is a fast and efficient way to deliver high-quality software.

Key Advantages of Continuous Integration

Actually, it is not difficult to guess what positive effects the use of this approach can bring among developers. However, we suggest taking a closer look at all the existing benefits of (CI) continuous integration.

Reduction of project implementation time. Experienced developers often note that continuous integration significantly reduces the time to create software and implement software updates.
Minimization of errors and defects in software. We want to note at once that this is one of the most important advantages of continuous integration. Why is it so? When changes are automatically tested at early stages, all possible vulnerabilities are detected at once. Thus, the finished product does not contain a large number of small bugs.
It cuts the time for fixing less. Even in cases where bugs are discovered after these processes are implemented, you can fix them quickly. This is all thanks to automated pipelines.
Opportunities for scalability. Pipelines can handle different projects and different workloads. Thus, it helps you scale your products.

In simple words, continuous integration makes your code changes better. This is helped by automated testing of changes, which significantly reduces the likelihood of bugs.

How Automated Testing is Integrated Into CI Pipelines

Continuous Integration (CI) pipelines depend on automated testing heavily, to make sure that new changes to the code don't break functionality or cause errors. Then, when developers make the updates and commit them to the shared repository, the CI pipeline triggers automatically. Continuous integration architecture includes the running of a series of automated tests to maintain code quality and performance as a fundamental part.

Typically, unit tests are started with and test each function or method to see that it does what it is supposed to do. The integration tests run next to verify that different parts of the system work together. The final function tests simulate the real-life activities of the user to check the working of software from the point of view of the user.

Every time that new code is committed, these tests will be run in the background. The pipeline stops if any test fails, and the development team is notified immediately so that the issue can be fixed. Without this rapid feedback loop, a piece of faulty code isn’t merged into the main project. By integrating automated testing into a continuous integration architecture, development teams can catch bugs early and maintain system stability. What are the main benefits of automated testing for DevOps? It ensures their software is always ready for deployment — saving time and reducing costly errors.

How Combining CI and CD Accelerates Deployment Cycles

It's no secret that customers often ask development teams to speed up the workflow. They want to get the planned software as soon as possible, and developers in such cases should know some tricks. Combining practices such as CI and CD is exactly what effectively helps to deal with such tasks. They work together to streamline the whole process so it is quicker and more reliable. Here’s how this combination improves deployment cycles:

Faster feedback loop. Change is automatically baked, tested and deployed so that developers see immediate results about how their code performs. It helps detect and fix issues quickly.
Improved customer satisfaction. This makes it easier for users to get new features and bug fixes by having smaller, more frequent updates than large, time-consuming releases.
Reduced manual effort. Test and deployment of solutions are automated, leaving developers free to concentrate on innovation rather than routine tasks.

Using automated continuous integration and deployment decreases human error, and every step of the process is predefined. Doing this means fewer failed deployments and less painful updates.

Tools and Technologies That Enable Fully Automated CI Pipelines

Obviously, experienced devs are well aware of the useful tools that are needed to work with CI automated pipelines. We decided to share with you a small list of tools that have been tested in real life.

Jenkins. The flexibility and scalability of Jenkins make it an open-source automation tool. It is highly customizable and supports many plugins that can be used for different workflows.
GitHub Actions. For small teams, it’s simply perfect and integrates nicely into the GitHub ecosystem. It enables developers to run tasks directly in their repositories, like running tests, building apps, and deploying.
Terraform. Infrastructure as Code, or IaC, is a method of defining and managing the runtime infrastructure to automate storage, computing, networking, and security. Terraform is a tool that does this.

With these tools at your disposal, you and your teams can create strong and efficient CI pipelines that automate entire steps of deployment.

Final thoughts

As you may have already realized, there are a number of benefits of continuous integration and deployment, due to which developers often use these practices. First, it reduces the time required to develop finished products and deploy them. Moreover, the probability of finding critical bugs at the final stages is close to zero because all code changes are automatically tested at early stages.