CI/CD
Definition
CI/CD is the shorthand for continuous integration combined with continuous delivery or continuous deployment — the practice of automating the full pipeline from code commit to production-ready (or production-deployed) software.
CI/CD is the most common way engineers refer to their automated software delivery pipeline. The 'CI' covers building and testing on every commit; the 'CD' covers everything from there to either a deployable artifact (continuous delivery) or an automatic production deployment (continuous deployment).
A typical CI/CD pipeline:
- Trigger: Developer pushes code or opens a pull request
- Install: Dependencies are installed in a clean environment
- Lint/format check: Code style and static analysis
- Unit tests: Fast, isolated tests of individual functions and classes
- Build: Application compiled and packaged into an artifact (container image, binary, etc.)
- Integration tests: Tests against real dependencies in a test environment
- Security scan: Dependency vulnerability check, SAST
- Staging deploy: Deploy to a staging environment
- Acceptance tests / smoke tests: Verify the staging deployment works end-to-end
- Production deploy or release gate: Auto-deploy (CD) or wait for approval (CD with manual gate)
CI/CD pipeline diagrams are one of the most common whiteboard drawings in engineering teams. New project kickoffs, infrastructure reviews, and DevOps planning sessions all produce pipeline sketches. BoardSnap AI reads the stage boxes and arrows to produce a structured summary of the delivery pipeline — useful input for the platform documentation that should follow the session.
Key tools: GitHub Actions, GitLab CI/CD, CircleCI, Jenkins, Buildkite, ArgoCD (for Kubernetes continuous delivery), Spinnaker.
Examples
- GitHub Actions: on PR, run lint + unit tests; on merge to main, build Docker image, push to ECR, deploy to ECS staging, run smoke tests, deploy to production
- Mobile CI/CD: on tag, run tests, build IPA, upload to TestFlight, submit for App Store review
- Monorepo CI/CD: detect changed packages, run only affected tests, build and deploy only changed services
- Infrastructure CI/CD: Terraform plan runs on PR, Terraform apply runs automatically after merge to main
Related terms
Snap a ci/cd. Ship its actions.
BoardSnap turns any whiteboard — including this one — into a summary and action plan.