CI/CD Best Practices: From Commit to Production in Minutes

Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery are the foundation of modern software delivery. Practical best practices for pipeline design, testing strategy, and safe deployment.

CI/CD as a Competitive Advantage¶

The ability to deliver software to production quickly and safely is a key competitive advantage. Companies with a mature CI/CD pipeline deploy tens to hundreds of times a day with minimal risk.

CI (Continuous Integration) = automatic build and test on every commit. CD (Continuous Delivery) = an automated path from commit to production, where deployment requires manual approval. Continuous Deployment = a fully automatic deployment with no human intervention.

Pipeline Design¶

An effective CI/CD pipeline has clear stages:

# Example Jenkins/GitLab CI pipeline
stages:
  - build
  - unit-tests
  - integration-tests
  - security-scan
  - deploy-staging
  - smoke-tests
  - deploy-production

build:
  script:
    - docker build -t app:${CI_COMMIT_SHA} .
    - docker push registry.company.com/app:${CI_COMMIT_SHA}

unit-tests:
  script:
    - docker run app:${CI_COMMIT_SHA} npm test

deploy-production:
  script:
    - helm upgrade app ./chart --set image.tag=${CI_COMMIT_SHA}
  when: manual  # Manual gate for production

Every stage is a gate — a failure stops the pipeline. Fast feedback: unit tests run first (fast), integration tests later (slow).

Testing Strategy¶

The testing pyramid defines the proportion of tests:

• Unit tests (70%) — fast, isolated, thousands of tests per second
• Integration tests (20%) — test collaboration of components, databases, APIs
• E2E tests (10%) — the full system, slow but important for critical flows

Additional layers:

• Static analysis — linting, type checking (ESLint, TypeScript)
• Security scanning — dependency vulnerability checking (Snyk, npm audit)
• Performance tests — load testing in the staging environment

Deployment Strategies¶

Safe deployment strategies:

• Rolling update — gradual replacement of instances, zero-downtime
• Blue/Green — two identical environments, switch at the load-balancer level
• Canary — new version for a small percentage of traffic, progressive rollout
• Feature flags — deploying code does not mean releasing functionality

A rollback plan is mandatory — automatic rollback on health-check failure. Monitoring and alerting must be part of the deployment process.

Conclusion: The Pipeline is a Product¶

A CI/CD pipeline is a product that requires maintenance and iteration. Invest in a reliable, fast pipeline — every minute spent waiting for a build costs developer productivity. Measure deployment frequency, lead time, and change failure rate. Goal: from commit to production in minutes, not days.