Development CI/CD
CI/CD (Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery) refers to innovations in the development and delivery processes of projects. These two processes are based on modern formulas that make it possible to make both the development process and the provision of tools more agile. This automation helps teams to work more productively and with higher quality.
Continuous Integration, CI
The technical goal of Continuous Integration or CI is that every change in the code is integrated, tested and implemented. This is a consistent, automated method and the whole process takes place in a shared environment, as the applications are usually developed by a team rather than just one person. All changes are made in "the same place", which enables faster integration of code.
Continuous Delivery, CD
Continuous Delivery or CD begins where CI ends. It automates application deployment in selected infrastructure environments. This means that it collects these codes and tests and automatically puts them into production. Most teams work with multiple environments, e.g. development and test environments. Continuous Delivery ensures that there is an automated way to forward code changes to them.n.
The advantages of CI/CD at a glance
Conflicts and problems are significantly reduced, resulting in better collaboration, software quality and a high-performance IT team.
Finished features can be published immediately after development without having to wait for the next release.
Thanks to continuous testing, errors can be found and rectified at an early stage.
CI/CD in e-commerce projects
Faster development response time
With CI/CD, you can test any number of types of code and integrate them into the product without major performance problems or time expenditure. This allows e-commerce websites to respond quickly to user requirements and needs. You can also adapt your website to changing market and user trends.
Better code quality and lower costs
With CI/CD, your development team can release multiple builds in a very short time, making your e-commerce website more stable and trouble-free. Online stores have many tools, features and categories - efficiency and robustness play a significant role in coding to ensure a valuable experience for the end user. Development costs are also reduced as the same process takes fewer hours.
Successful market positioning
Shortening the time to deliver features and tools by using the CI/CD model helps to shorten the time between measuring demand and responding to it. This increases your market success rate by capturing the space before someone else does. And standing out from the competition is one of the most important tasks in e-commerce.
GitLab CI/CD
GitLab offers an automatic continuous build/continuous deployment pipeline. This means that the code in each project is automatically checked, built, tested and converted into an executable format after a change to the Git repository.
What is Ansible?
Ansible is an easy-to-use, robust and completely open-source automation platform. It helps with configuration management, application deployment and task automation and also makes it easier to coordinate and manage the deployment of IT infrastructures where you need to complete tasks sequentially and create a chain of events that need to take place on multiple servers or different devices.
Disadvantages of CI/CD
CI/CD is the perfect model for qualitative software development. However, there are disadvantages: additional servers and environments are required, and suitable test procedures also need to be developed.
To avoid the loss of confidential information, theft and disclosure of information, the service provider must be selected correctly and confidentiality agreements must be added to the service contracts.
How is CI/CD realized in our company?
Our deployment system is designed for fast delivery and testing of code. The core of our CI/CD is GitLab, which provides the functionality for full control over pipelines. Our CI/CD works together with Ansible - this means that all commands are executed on a remote server by it. We keep the development, stage and live environments up to date according to the Git repository. For each project, a specific configuration has been provided for delivering the source code to the server, also for running the commands for clearing the cache, compiling and building themes for Shopware, Oxid or other software, as well as updating all dependencies of packages. Our E-Commerce Webagentur guarantee fast code release delivery with minimal downtime and support the blue-green deployment strategy.
Blue/green provision
A blue/green deployment is a deployment strategy where you create two separate but identical environments. One environment (blue) runs the current application version and the other environment (green) runs the new application version. Blue-green deployment offers greater security for both the customer and the developers. Firstly, the release version can be tested directly on the active environment. Secondly, there is the stable previous version, which can be reactivated at any time - so programming errors or compatibility errors have less impact.
We also support CI/CD for Shopware and OXID
Both store software packages support the blue-green approach - you can revert to the previous version at any time for updates and the implementation of new functions.
