As DevOps continues to be one of the most popular approaches to software development, developers across different organizations embrace it to deliver high-quality products with fewer bugs and introduce new changes and features quickly and continuously. 

In this expanding realm of DevOps, CI/CD helps continuously test and integrate different teams’ efforts to accelerate software releases. Giving customers fast and efficient releases to the code. 

Setting up a CI/CD pipeline requires understanding the concept, thorough planning, and a tool like Jenkins. This will allow enterprises to increase productivity, ensure high-quality code, accelerate time-to-market, and maximize customer satisfaction.

Read on further as we walk you through

To stay competitive in today’s volatile business landscape, organizations need to be able to introduce new features and changes into their products quickly. This is essential to keep up with the pace of technological advances and market trends. Therefore, having the right platforms and tools for rapid release cycles has become a core necessity. Especially for those looking to increase the overall quality, efficiency, and speed of the software delivery process.  Therefore, having the right platforms and tools for rapid release cycles has become a core necessity. Especially for those looking to increase the overall quality, efficiency, and speed of the software delivery process. 

CI/CD refers to the continuous integration and deployment of software products by introducing automation across different stages of the software development lifecycle. 

• CI integrates the coding efforts of individual developers into a central repository allowing the changes to merge quickly and easily.
• CD goes a step ahead. It makes sure that every change made in the production stage is released to the customer. 

Together, the concepts eliminate the building of new features in isolation. However, with these new concepts, bug prevention happens early on in the process. This way, quality remains high and customer satisfaction is always at an all-time high. CI/CD also ensures that every change is validated via test automation. This helps shorten the feedback loop and prevents failed tests from being deployed to production.

The CI/CD pipeline establishes a series of steps that software development teams should follow to quickly and efficiently deliver a good quality version of the software. Using DevOps and site reliability engineering concepts, the pipeline improves software development and delivery outcomes. In addition, it introduces automation to ensure quicker integration of different features and faster time-to-market. 

Setting up a CI CD pipeline allows modern DevOps teams to keep pace with the rapidly evolving technology landscape. When combined with agile concepts, the pipeline can streamline the software development lifecycle, resulting in higher-quality software with faster delivery. Through each subsequent build, test, and deployment stage, the product under development is constantly monitored for errors and discrepancies, and immediate feedback is provided to the team.

Jenkins is a popular automation server used to implement CI/CD for any development project. Testing early and testing often the tool helps in accelerating the development cycle. It also helps maintaining the required levels of quality via automated testing. So, what does Jenkins do, and why should you use it for your CI CD pipeline?

Automates tasks

Jenkins allows teams to execute a series of automated tests and builds. This ensures the code is always up-to-date and free of bugs. Offering a suite of plugins that help in integrating continuous delivery pipelines, so code is committed, versioned, and reviewed quickly. 

Isolates codes

One of the primary benefits Jenkins delivers is the ability to discover and fix bugs rapidly. If newly committed code introduces a defect into the build, Jenkins helps identify, isolate, and rectify it in time while triggering the commit process again. 

Ensures code quality:

Implementing CI/CD using a tool like Jenkins can significantly simplify development activities while providing high code quality and successful builds.

Streamlines troubleshooting

For large development teams working on a single project, Jenkins helps overcome conflicting code commits.

Enables extensions:

Jenkins also allows teams to easily extend the CI/CD pipeline using a wide variety of plugins. The 1600+ ecosystem of plugins means teams can find one for almost anything they need and cater to their evolving CI/CD needs without disruption.

Jenkins provides DevOps teams with various tools and interfaces to automate the development and deployment process as an automated, open-source tool. Jenkins’ flexibility, ease of use, and a large ecosystem of plugins make it one of the most sought-after tools for CI/CD.

Here’s how you can set up a CI/CD pipeline with Jenkins:  

• Log in to Jenkins and create a new pipeline.
• Configure the pipeline on the Pipeline Configuration Screen and set build triggers and other options for your pipeline.
• Define different pipeline stages in the “Pipeline Definition” section and save them.
• Execute the pipeline by clicking on “Build Now” and automatically executing all your stages.
• Expand the pipeline definition, if needed, by adding more stages to it or by integrating additional external code repositories, test frameworks, and deployment strategies.
• Visualize different elements across the pipeline using the “Build Pipeline” option and view the timeline of your pipeline events