General CI/CD pipeline examples

A general Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) pipeline is an automated workflow designed to streamline software delivery, from a developer's initial code commit to the application's deployment in a production environment.   

 The pipeline typically consists of several core stages: 

 

 General CI/CD Pipeline Stages 

 

 

 

 

 

 Stage   

 Description 

 Key Activities 

 Example Tools 

 

 

 Source/Commit 

 The process is triggered when a developer pushes code changes to a shared repository. 

 Code commit, version control, manage branches. 

 Git ,  GitHub ,  GitLab ,  Bitbucket 

 

 

 Build 

 The committed code is fetched, compiled into an executable artifact (like a container image), and its dependencies are linked. 

 Compiling code, packaging application, running static analysis (SAST), creating container images (Docker). 

 Maven, Gradle, Docker, Jenkins,  AWS CodeBuild 

 

 

 Test 

 Automated tests are run to validate the new code and ensure it doesn't break existing functionality. 

 Unit testing, integration testing, security testing (DAST, IAST), performance testing, regression testing. 

 JUnit, Selenium, Jest, Pytest, Katalon, SonarQube 

 

 

 Staging/Deploy 

 The application artifact is deployed to a staging or pre-production environment that mirrors the production setting. 

 Environment provisioning, configuration, user acceptance testing (UAT). 

 Ansible, Chef, Spinnaker, Kubernetes,  AWS CodeDeploy 

 

 

 Production 

 If all tests pass and stakeholders approve (in CD, this is automatic), the application is automatically deployed to the live production environment for end-users. 

 Automated deployment, canary releases, blue-green deployments. 

 Kubernetes, Docker, Jenkins,  AWS CodePipeline ,  Azure DevOps 

 

 

 Monitor/Feedback 

 Post-deployment, the application's health, performance, and user feedback are continuously tracked. 

 Tracking performance, error reporting, collecting user feedback. 

 Prometheus, Grafana, New Relic, PagerDuty 

 

 

 

 

 

 Real-World Examples by Platform 

 Specific implementations combine the general stages using different toolchains and configurations:   

 

 Jenkins Pipeline:  A highly flexible, open-source example often uses Jenkins to orchestrate the entire process, integrating various plugins for tasks like building a Java web app with Maven, testing with JUnit, and deploying with Docker and Kubernetes. 

 GitLab CI/CD:  GitLab offers built-in CI/CD features configured via a  .gitlab-ci.yml  file in the repository. A typical pipeline might involve pushing Python code to a repository, automatically triggering linting and Pytest jobs, followed by an automatic deployment to a service like Heroku upon success. 

 AWS CodePipeline:  An example within the Amazon ecosystem uses AWS services exclusively. A developer commits a Node.js application to AWS CodeCommit, which triggers a CodePipeline workflow that uses CodeBuild for building and CodeDeploy for deployment to various AWS environments. 

 GitHub Actions:  With  GitHub Actions , workflows are triggered by events like a pull request. The workflow can automatically build and test the code in a virtual environment and then deploy the merged request to production.