Introduction
In today’s fast-paced software development landscape, Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) pipelines are essential for delivering high-quality applications swiftly and reliably. However, maximizing the potential of CI/CD requires advanced strategies that go beyond the basics. Here, we explore six steps to elevate your CI/CD pipelines, incorporating the latest tools, techniques, and best practices.
1. Increase Continuous Testing with GenAI
Continuous testing is a cornerstone of effective CI/CD pipelines. According to the 2023-24 World Quality Report, 80% of respondents indicated that 25% to 50% of their automated testing is integrated into their delivery pipelines. Despite this, many organizations struggle with a “quality debt,” a backlog of tests that aren’t automated.
David Brooks, SVP of evangelism at Copado, highlights the prevalent reliance on manual testing and the maintenance challenges of automated tests. Updating automation to match code changes, improving test performance, and generating sufficient test data are ongoing hurdles. Here, synthetic data and generative AI (genAI) can be transformative. GenAI can expand the number of automated tests and simplify their maintenance, making automated testing a more reliable part of CI/CD pipelines.
Gevorg Hovsepyan, head of product at Mabl, emphasizes that while many teams use genAI to generate test cases, its real impact lies in automatically updating tests as the product evolves. This approach can prevent CI/CD pipelines from stalling due to failing tests, thereby advancing CI/CD capabilities.
Integrating performance, stress, and scalability testing tools such as Gatling, LoadNinja, LoadRunner, and Katalon into CI/CD platforms can further enhance continuous testing. These tools help ensure that applications can handle expected loads and perform well under various conditions, leading to more robust and reliable software.
2. Target Continuous Deployment
Continuous testing is a prerequisite for continuous deployment, where DevSecOps teams extend CI/CD to deploy directly to production environments. To achieve continuous deployment, teams should use feature flagging, develop a canary release strategy, and leverage AIops platforms for IT operations.
The State of CI/CD Report 2024 underscores the business impacts of continuous deployment, noting significant reductions in lead time for code changes. Organizations that can deploy multiple times per day see a lead time of less than one day for 53% of them, compared to only 9% for those deploying once per week to once per month.
Kumar Chivukula, founder and CEO of Opsera, notes that AI-enabled DevOps tools can boost developer productivity by over 30%. Post-deployment, enterprises seek automated mechanisms to capture insights, key performance indicators (KPIs), and DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) metrics to validate industry claims and realize return on investment (ROI).
Improving lead time for code changes is crucial for applications where defects and downtime result in lost revenue, poor customer experiences, or disrupted employee workflows. Continuous deployment ensures that new features and bug fixes reach users quickly, maintaining a competitive edge.
3. Embrace Hybrid CI/CD
The State of CI/CD report reveals that using a hybrid approach of self-hosted and managed CI/CD platforms can enhance performance. Companies adopting this strategy outperformed those standardizing on a single approach or not using CI/CD platforms at all.
Organizations using a hybrid approach reported faster lead times and quicker outage recovery. For example, 49% had a lead time of less than one week for changes, and 24% had a lead time of less than one day. Additionally, 66% could restore service performance from an unplanned outage in under a day, with 25% achieving this in under an hour.
The diversity of CI/CD platforms is often due to varied application environments. For instance, a company might use Copado or Opsera for Salesforce apps, Jenkins for data center applications, GitHub Actions for cloud-native apps, and AWS CodeBuild and CodePipeline for acquired businesses. The report suggests consolidating and standardizing tools with similar capabilities to reap the benefits of a multi-platform approach without the complexity.
4. Shift-Left Security with CI/CD Plugins
Integrating third-party capabilities via plugins is a crucial step in enhancing CI/CD pipelines. Jenkins, a leading CI/CD platform, offers over 1,900 plugins, with top plugins supporting Git, Jira, and Kubernetes integrations. Security and code quality plugins are vital to evaluate, as they help minimize vulnerabilities before code passes builds and is deployed.
Aislinn Wright, VP of product management at EDB, points out that predictive analytics and AI-enhanced quality code reviews can identify bugs, security vulnerabilities, and data governance issues. These tools enhance the agility and efficiency of DevOps processes but require higher technological maturity and integration effort, contributing to slower adoption rates.
Security capabilities to consider include container security scanning, static application security testing (SAST), code quality scanning, and software supply chain vulnerability checking. As Peter McKee, head of developer relations and community at Sonar, states, incorporating static code analysis in CI/CD processes ensures clean, reliable, maintainable, and secure code, meeting modern demands for high-value features delivered swiftly and securely.
5. Secure and Improve Pipeline Observability
Securing CI/CD pipelines is critical to preventing unauthorized code pushes, dependency chain issues, and risks associated with unvalidated third-party services. The OWASP CI/CD security cheat sheet provides valuable guidelines for reviewing CI/CD risks, secure pipeline configurations, identity and access management (IAM), and managing third-party code.
Balancing CI/CD enhancements that accelerate deployment frequencies with those that address security risks is essential. DevSecOps teams should also focus on improving observability to identify performance issues, track testing bottlenecks, and debug problems with third-party services.
One effective approach is implementing Policy-as-Code (PaC), which abstracts policies and rules into code. PaC provides a scalable way to capture, implement, and scale security and operational business rules, ensuring consistent management of critical policies. Mike Scott, CISO of Immuta, explains that PaC can be integrated into CI/CD pipelines to perform testing and validation, automatically deploying validated policies to production environments.
6. Understand the Business Impacts
DevSecOps teams should continually explore advanced options and determine which DORA metrics to implement through continuous improvement cycles. However, as Srikumar Ramanathan, chief solutions officer at Mphasis, reminds us, the ultimate objective is to serve the business.
Shifting left means taking a business-centric view, considering QA, security, observability, and automation from a business perspective. Defining beneficiaries and value propositions from operational and security improvements helps DevSecOps teams focus on capabilities that drive meaningful business value.
A best practice is to target performance metrics that align with business goals, ensuring that technical advancements translate into tangible benefits. Whether it’s improving customer experiences, increasing revenue, or enhancing employee productivity, aligning CI/CD improvements with business objectives is crucial for success.
Conclusion
Enhancing your CI/CD pipelines with these advanced strategies ensures improved efficiency, security, and alignment with business goals. Continuous improvement and the right tools are key to driving impactful results. By integrating continuous testing, targeting continuous deployment, embracing hybrid approaches, shifting security left, securing pipelines, and understanding business impacts, organizations can achieve superior CI/CD performance and deliver high-quality software faster and more reliably.