CI/CD pipeline
A CI/CD pipeline is the automated chain of build / test / deploy steps that runs on every code change. CI (continuous integration) means merging changes to a shared branch frequently with automated tests. CD (continuous delivery / deployment) means the pipeline's output is always shippable — sometimes auto-deployed to production, sometimes gated behind a manual approval.
The line between continuous delivery and continuous deployment is whether deploys to production are automatic (deployment) or gated (delivery). Both rely on the same pipeline mechanics: every commit triggers build + test + (optionally) deploy. Modern pipelines also include security scanning, dependency-audit, performance testing, and post-deploy verification (canary analysis, smoke tests). Pipeline duration is a flow-killer at scale — teams routinely invest in test parallelization + caching to keep total pipeline time under 15 minutes.
Long-form posts that explore ci/cd pipeline in depth — when to use it, common failure modes, how AI helps.
Related terms
- Continuous deployment
Continuous deployment automatically deploys every change that passes the test suite into production — no human gate between merging code and serving traffic.
- Trunk-based development
Trunk-based development is a source-control workflow where engineers integrate small changes to a single shared branch (trunk / main) at least once per day, gated by automated tests and feature flags rather than long-lived branches.
- Regression test
A regression test verifies that previously working functionality still works after a code change.