Chapter 6. Continuous integration and continuous deployment

Deploying software into production is difficult. One major challenge is adequately testing applications before they make it into production. And adequate testing requires one of the longest-standing challenges in IT: consistent environments. For many organizations, it’s time-consuming to stand up new environments for development, testing, QA, and more. When the environments are finally in place, they’re often inconsistent. These inconsistencies develop over time due to poor configuration management, partial fixes, and fixing problems upstream, such as directly making a patch in a production environment. Inconsistent environments can lead to unpredictable software. To eliminate risk, organizations often schedule maintenance windows during software deployments and then cross their fingers.

6.1. Container images as the centerpiece of a CI/CD pipeline

6.2. Promoting images

6.3. CI/CD part 1: creating a development environment

6.4. CI/CD part 2: promoting dev images into a test environment

6.5. CI/CD part 3: masking sensitive data in a production environment

6.6. Using Jenkins as the backbone of a CI/CD pipeline

6.7. Deployment strategies

6.8. Summary