Continuous Integration / Continuous Deployment

CI/CD is a pair of practices that automate how code changes are built, tested, and released. Continuous integration means every commit or pull request triggers an automated pipeline that compiles the project, runs unit and integration tests, and reports failures back to the author within minutes. Continuous delivery or deployment extends that pipeline so a passing build is packaged and pushed to staging or production without manual steps. The goal is small, frequent, reversible releases rather than large risky ones. GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Jenkins, and CircleCI are the common pipeline engines, and they usually run each job in a fresh container so results stay reproducible. A typical web pipeline installs dependencies, runs a type check and linter, executes tests, builds the artifact, and deploys to a host such as Vercel or a Kubernetes cluster. Teams often add gates so a deploy proceeds only when tests pass and a reviewer approves the change. The frequent pitfall is a slow or flaky test suite. When a pipeline takes too long or fails at random, developers begin ignoring or bypassing it, which removes the safety it was meant to provide. CI/CD is the operational half of DevOps and pairs directly with infrastructure as code.