Best practices for awesome CI/CD

In the fast-paced world of software development, implementing Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) has become a critical aspect of success. CI/CD enables teams to rapidly and reliably deliver high-quality software by automating the build, test, and deployment processes. However, simply adopting CI/CD is not enough; to truly reap the benefits, teams must follow best practices that ensure efficiency, reliability, and consistency. In this blog post, we'll explore key CI/CD best practices and how the Harness Software Delivery Platform can help you optimize your software delivery pipeline.

Commit Early, Commit Often

One of the fundamental principles of CI/CD is to integrate code changes frequently. Ideally, developers are integrating their work into the mainline at least once per day. By committing early and often, developers can catch integration issues early in the development cycle, reducing the risk of complex merge conflicts and enabling faster feedback loops. Encourage your team to break down work into small, manageable tasks and commit code changes regularly.

Harness CI supports this best practice by providing a fast and efficient build process. With intelligent caching optimized cloud builds, Harness CI ensures that your builds are lightning-fast, allowing developers to commit code frequently and get rapid feedback. While you an run a CI process with shared build box and rubber chicken, modern CI demands optimization and speed.

Get Back to Green Quickly

A green build is a happy build. In CI/CD, it's crucial to maintain a stable and reliable build process. If the build is failing, it should be the top priority to fix it. Failing builds not only hinder the delivery process but also erode team confidence and productivity. Implement automated tests, linters, and code quality checks to catch issues early and ensure that the main branch remains in a deployable state.

This said, if tests are never failing and the build never turns red, you are probably not testing well enough or moving quickly enough. The occasional broken build is fine. The team simply needs to prioritize

Harness CI offers extensive testing capabilities, including automated unit, integration, and acceptance tests. With Harness' Test Intelligence feature, you can optimize your test execution by automatically identifying and running only the tests affected by code changes, saving time and resources.

Build Only Once

Building artifacts multiple times across different stages of the pipeline introduces unnecessary complexity and inconsistency. Instead, adopt the practice of building once and promoting the same artifact through the various stages of testing and deployment. This ensures that the artifact being tested and deployed is the same one that was built, reducing the risk of introducing discrepancies.

Harness simplifies artifact management by providing a universal artifact registry (currently in Beta). You can store and version your artifacts, ensuring that the same artifact is used consistently throughout the pipeline.

Streamline Your Tests

Testing is an integral part of the CI/CD process, but it's important to strike a balance between thorough testing and fast feedback loops. Prioritize tests based on their importance and impact. Run fast-running unit tests first, followed by integration tests and then more extensive end-to-end tests. Parallelize test execution where possible to speed up the feedback cycle.

Harness CI includes test impact analysis capability known as "Test Intelligence" which allows you to optimize your test suite. By leveraging Test Intelligence, Harness can identify and prioritize tests based based on call paths and which code was changed in the latest build.

Clean Your Environments

Consistent and reliable environments are essential for successful CI/CD. Ensure that your environments are versioned, reproducible, and disposable. Use infrastructure-as-code (IaC) practices to define and manage your environments, enabling version control and easy rollbacks. Clean up environments after each deployment to avoid configuration drift and ensure a fresh start for the next deployment.

Harness provides robust deployment and environment management capabilities. With Harness' Infrastructure Provisioners, you can define and manage your environments using popular IaC tools like Terraform, CloudFormation, and Kubernetes manifests. Harness also supports automatic environment cleanup, ensuring that your environments remain clean and consistent.

Make It the Only Way to Deploy to Production

To ensure consistency and reliability, establish your CI/CD pipeline as the sole path to production deployment. Discourage manual deployments or ad-hoc changes to production environments. By enforcing deployment through the pipeline, you maintain a standardized and auditable process, reducing the risk of human error and enabling easier rollbacks if needed.

With Harness' pipeline governance features, you can enforce policies and approvals, ensuring that only authorized changes make it to production.

Release Progressively

Deploying an entire application all at once is no longer in vogue. We now understand that deploying little by little delivers a better user experience while minimizing risks. Consider deploying an application to a cluster using techniques like a Canary deployment. Canary deployments deploy the new version alongside the existing, sending only a small amount of traffic to the new. Only after seeing that users are successful with the new version is the deployment completed removing the old version. This approach exposes only a few users to the new version at first, helping minimize the risk and ensuring that rollback (disabling the new version) is easy.

Another approach to progressive delivery is to enable individual features separately from releasing the new version of the code. A feature management tool will allow you to first see that the new version of the code is stable, then experiment with each new feature making sure they have the desired impact. This approach refines your CD significantly.

Monitor and Measure Your Pipeline

To continuously improve your CI/CD process, it's crucial to monitor and measure the performance of your pipeline. Collect metrics such as build times, test coverage, deployment frequency, and mean time to recovery (MTTR). Use these metrics to identify bottlenecks, optimize processes, and track improvements over time. Implement monitoring and alerting to proactively detect and resolve issues.

Harness provides built-in analytics and reporting capabilities, giving you visibility into the health and performance of your CI/CD pipeline. You can track key metrics, identify trends, and make data-driven decisions to optimize your software delivery process.

Make It a Team Effort

CI/CD is not just a tool or a process; it's part of a DevOps culture. Involve the entire team, including developers, testers, and operations, in the design and implementation of your CI/CD pipeline. Foster collaboration and shared ownership, encouraging everyone to contribute to the continuous improvement of the process. Provide training and support to ensure that everyone understands and adheres to the best practices.

Harness supports collaboration and teamwork through features like role-based access control (RBAC) and policy-as-code. You can define granular permissions and policies to ensure that team members have the right level of access and control over the pipeline. Harness also integrates with popular collaboration tools, making it easy to share information and work together effectively.

Harness Your CI/CD Potential

While following CI/CD best practices is essential, having the right tools and platform can greatly streamline and enhance your software delivery process. The Harness Software Delivery Platform offers a comprehensive solution for CI/CD, empowering teams to build, test, and deploy software with ease and efficiency.

Harness CI is designed to accelerate your builds and tests, providing lightning-fast performance through intelligent caching and optimized cloud builds. With Harness' Test Intelligence, you can optimize your test execution, focusing on the most critical tests and reducing feedback cycle times.

One of the key advantages of Harness is its extensive out-of-the-box capabilities. Harness minimizes the need for custom scripting, providing pre-built integrations and templates for popular tools and platforms. This allows teams to get up and running quickly, without the overhead of extensive configuration and maintenance.

Governance and compliance are critical aspects of any CI/CD pipeline, and Harness has you covered. With granular RBAC and policy-as-code approaches, Harness enables you to enforce strict controls over your pipeline. You can define and enforce policies for approvals, security scans, and compliance checks, ensuring that your software delivery process meets the highest standards of quality and security.

By leveraging Harness' powerful features and adhering to CI/CD best practices, you can supercharge your software delivery pipeline. Whether you're a small startup or a large enterprise, Harness provides the flexibility, scalability, and reliability needed to succeed in today's fast-paced software development landscape.

Conclusion

Implementing CI/CD best practices is essential for organizations looking to streamline their software delivery process and stay competitive in the market. By committing early and often, keeping builds green, building only once, streamlining tests, cleaning environments, enforcing deployment through the pipeline, monitoring and measuring, and fostering a collaborative culture, teams can optimize their CI/CD pipeline for success.

The Harness Software Delivery Platform provides a comprehensive solution that aligns with these best practices, offering fast CI, minimal scripting, strong governance, and a range of features designed to accelerate and simplify your software delivery process. By combining the power of Harness with adherence to CI/CD best practices, you can unlock the full potential of your software delivery pipeline and deliver value to your customers faster than ever before.

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