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¶ Environment Setup and CI/CD
¶ What it is
Environment setup is to provide the environment for development, testing, staging and production purpose. Nowadays, we usually choose cloud platform to build the infrastructure, so it would include the allocation of servers and other cloud components.
CI/CD refers to the combination of continuous integration and continuous delivery. It bridges the gaps between development and operation activities and teams by implementing automation in building, testing and deployment of applications.
¶ Why it is useful
By removing traditional barriers, CI/CD automates the process of integrating, building, deploying and releasing software. It supports both the DevOps methodology, which unites development and operations teams, and the greater objective of agile methodology, which is to shorten the software development lifecycle. The advantages it brings include:
- Ship deliverables efficiently
- Increase productivity
- Reduce risk of defects
- Standardize the entire processes
¶ When to use it
Before the development sprints start, the development environment should be set up on the developers' machines. The environments and the pipelines of testing/staging/production must be ready before each corresponding action (testing/UAT/releases) is started.
¶ How is it done
- Determine the code hosting service, cloud infrastructure, application distribution channels, etc.
- Select the appropriate CI/CD service that most suite the company needs and requirements.
- Determine how many pipelines are required and the steps within each pipeline.
- Create documentations to describe the entire CI/CD strategy to make sure it is aligned within the team.
¶ Do's & Don't
Do's
- Make the configuration of testing and staging environment as similar as the production environment.
- Leverage the existing code hosting services to choose the most appropriate CI/CD service.
- Try to put unit testing and automation test into the pipelines.
Don't
- Never manually build the application from a local machine after the pipelines are set up.
¶ Tools needed
¶ Example
