{"head":{"title":"What Is CI/CD? Continuous Integration and Delivery","description":"CI/CD builds and tests every code change automatically, then ships it through a repeatable pipeline. What each half means, an example and mistakes.","canonical":"https://oceanlab.in/glossary/ci-cd"},"crumbs":[{"name":"Home","path":"/"},{"name":"Glossary","path":"/glossary"},{"name":"CI/CD","path":"/glossary/ci-cd"}],"slug":"ci-cd","term":"CI/CD (continuous integration and delivery)","aka":["continuous integration","continuous delivery","continuous deployment"],"category":"Hosting and delivery","short":"An automated pipeline that builds and tests every code change (CI) and then releases it to users in a repeatable way (CD).","body":[["Continuous integration means every change is merged often and checked automatically: build, tests, linting, security scans. Continuous delivery means a passing change is always ready to release with one action. Continuous deployment goes one step further and releases every passing change automatically."],["The pipeline is the same every time, so releases stop depending on one person's laptop or memory."]],"why":["Small, frequent, tested releases break less than big, rare ones, and are easier to fix when they do. CI/CD is what makes that safe. It also gives buyers evidence: every release has a record of what was tested and who approved it."],"example":["A team working on a fintech app opens a pull request. The pipeline runs unit tests, an end-to-end test of sign-up and a dependency scan. Once merged, it deploys to staging, and a second approver promotes it to production, which is logged."],"inBuild":["We set up CI/CD in the first week of a project, with preview environments for each change, tests that run in minutes and production releases that need an approval where the client's controls ask for it. Infrastructure changes go through the same pipeline via ",{"href":"/glossary/infrastructure-as-code","text":"infrastructure as code"},"."],"mistakes":[["Slow pipelines, so people batch changes and skip the point of it."],["Flaky tests that get ignored, until a real failure gets ignored too."],["Secrets pasted into pipeline logs or config files."]],"related":[{"href":"/glossary/infrastructure-as-code","label":"Infrastructure as code (IaC)","detail":"Defining servers, networks, databases and other cloud resources in code files that are versioned and applied automatically, instead of setting them up by hand."},{"href":"/glossary/blue-green-deployment","label":"Blue-green deployment","detail":"A release method that runs two identical production environments and switches all traffic from the old one to the new one in one step."},{"href":"/glossary/canary-release","label":"Canary release","detail":"A release method that sends a small share of users to a new version first, watches for problems, and widens the rollout step by step."},{"href":"/glossary/feature-flag","label":"Feature flag","detail":"A switch in the code that turns a feature on or off for chosen users at runtime, without deploying new code."},{"href":"/glossary/container","label":"Container (software)","detail":"A package that holds an application and everything it needs to run, isolated from other software on the same machine."}],"tools":[{"href":"/tools/sprint-velocity-calculator","label":"Sprint velocity calculator","detail":"Free tool"}],"links":[{"href":"/embedded-engineers","label":"Embedded engineers","detail":"OceanLab engineers working inside your team."},{"href":"/software","label":"Software by industry","detail":"Systems we build per industry, with guides and tools."}],"sources":[],"legal":false,"updatedAt":"2026-10-25"}