CI/CD

CI/CD is the practice of automatically testing and shipping code every time someone changes it. Continuous integration means every change is merged into the shared codebase often, and each merge triggers a build and a run of the test suite, so breakages are caught within minutes rather than at the end of a release cycle. Continuous delivery goes further: changes that pass are automatically packaged and made ready to release, and in continuous deployment they go straight to production. A pipeline is the sequence of stages, build, test, deploy, each acting as a gate. The point is to make releasing small, routine and boring instead of rare and risky.