CI/CD vs DevOps: Choosing the Workflow for Your Projects

Both CI/CD and DevOps aim to help you improve various aspects of software development, such as delivery speed, reliability, and team collaboration. Both methods focus on enhancing development efficiency, but the difference lies in the scope and goals of their procedures. While CI/CD revolves around the automation of integration, testing, and deployment processes, the scale of DevOps is broader, as it focuses on ensuring collaboration between development and operations teams.

What is DevOps

DevOps represents an interconnection of various cultural philosophies, methods, and tools. As they all serve the purpose of swift application and service delivery, this approach mainly focuses on eliminating silos between development and operations teams. It often unites them into one single team instead of keeping them separate, a practice to ensure that engineers work with all the stages of the application lifecycle, from development and testing to deployment and operations.

Some DevOps models include integrating quality assurance, security, and configuration management within each phase of the application lifecycle. Configuration management in DevOps guarantees that system setup and infrastructure remain consistent, a feature that allows teams to handle changes effectively and keep environments stable. When the emphasis is moved from DevOps to DevSecOps, security takes the central role and is integrated throughout the entire application lifecycle.

DevOps’s practices and automation tools help engineers simplify various processes as well as handle various tasks (e.g. deploying code, provisioning infrastructure, and managing configurations). Using development operations results in major improvements regarding speed, reliability, and collaboration, a feature that sets it apart from other traditional techniques. Additionally, it handles cultural and operational facets of software delivery, therefore complementing CI/CD.

What is CI/CD

Embracing the culture of CI/CD plays a crucial role in development operations (DevOps), as it represents the process of automating the software release lifecycle. Since CI/CD involves several components that are likely to be confused, let us clarify them. CI/DC stands for:

• CI: Continuous Integration
  The practice of automatically integrating code changes from multiple developers into a shared repository, followed by automated testing to detect errors early.
• CD: can refer to either of the following:
• Continuous Delivery: Ensures code is always in a deployable state, but releasing to production requires manual approval.
• Continuous Deployment: Automates the entire pipeline, including deploying changes to production without manual intervention.

As you can see, continuous delivery and continuous deployment differ when it comes to releasing changes to the production environment, more specifically, in reliance on human involvement and continuity of the deployment process.

CI/CD ensures that all or at least the majority of the manual processes usually needed to get new code from a commit into production are automated. A CI/CD pipeline involves the typical stages of the source, build, test, staging, and production. What it also allows development teams to do is apply changes to code and have them automatically tested and pushed to deployment. You could say that CI/CD is a pipeline where new code is submitted on one end, then tested through a series of stages, and finally released as code ready for production.

Continuous Integration

Continuous Integration (CI) is a practice that involves integrating code changes into a shared repository with high frequency to provide new, automatically tested updates. Part of the process is creating feature branches, adding local changes, and unifying them back into the main branch after they have passed automated tests and code checks. The main goal of the feature is to help teams identify and manage integration issues promptly.

Prior to adopting continuous integration, team developers would work independently for extended periods, only merging their changes into the main branch after finishing their tasks. This approach made the code integration process more complex and time-consuming, often leading to accumulated errors due to delayed corrections. These challenges significantly slowed down the delivery of updates.

Continuous Delivery

Continuous delivery builds on CI by automatically moving changes to production after they have been fully tested in development and staging. Unlike continuous delivery, which requires manual interference to approve production releases, continuous deployment skips this step and allows for automated rollouts. The pipeline involves key steps like unit testing, setting up resources, and integration testing to ensure reliable updates through all the stages.

Utilizing an automation pipeline provides a range of benefits, including a simplified software development process, minimum manual effort, and consistent delivery of high-quality code ready for production. Translating automation to efficiency, all of them add to the broader DevOps approach.

How CI/CD and DevOps Relate

As a branch that DevOps encompasses, CI/CD could be defined as a specific implementation strategy which focuses on fostering efficiency, automation, and high-quality software delivery. The intricacies of how CI/CD and DevOps are related are as follows:

• Common goal
  Both center on improving the speed, reliability, and quality of software delivery. While CI/CD provides automated code integration, testing, and deployment, DevOps creates the right environment and structure to support these practices.
• CI/CD as one of the DevOps practices
  Continuous integration and delivery revolves around implementing continuous integration, delivery, and deployment to simplify and improve technical workflows, which in turn helps realize the broader principles of automation and teamwork.
• Complementary roles
  The two methods work in tandem: DevOps handles eliminating silos, ensuring collaboration, and aligning teams whereas CI/CD helps automatically manage the steps involved in software delivery processes.
• Integration
  DevOps ensures the right conditions for CI/CD to work effectively by promoting cross-team collaboration and operational consistency.

Key Differences Between CI/CD and DevOps

Scope of Operations

As a cultural and operational model, DevOps encompasses all stages of the software development lifecycle. The main tasks of this approach include:

• ensuring collaboration among development, operations, quality assurance, and security teams;
• eliminating silos to enhance productivity and reliability.

DevOps focuses on managing technical aspects like servers and settings, keeping track of system performance, logging important data, and monitoring teamwork. It provides scalability, compliance, and operational consistency with the help of tools, such as microservices, infrastructure as code (IaC), and policy as code.

In contrast, the focus of CI/CD as a subset of DevOps is less holistic and revolves around automating the software release process. The pipelines it uses encompass code integration, testing, delivery, and deployment and provide swift and reliable updates. Continuous integration and delivery is mainly concerned with technical working processes (building, testing, and deploying code) within the limit of source, build, test, staging and production phases and provides high-quality delivery while avoiding broader cultural or operational aspects.

The key difference is that DevOps creates a complete system that brings together teams, processes, and tools throughout the entire lifecycle, while CI/CD has a much more specialized focus on automating and improving the technical pipeline for software delivery and deployment.

Purpose And Focus Areas

DevOps exists to address organizational silos through ensuring communication, shared accountability, and continuous improvement during all stages of the software lifecycle. DevOps’s priorities enlist speed, reliability, and scalability, features that allow teams to deliver high-quality software and change accordingly to evolving business needs and customer demands at the same time. One means of achieving those is an all-encompassing responsibility, which helps smoothen each aspect – from code development to production deployment – and match it with organizational goals.

On the other hand, CI/CD aims to ensure swift, frequent, and reliable delivery of code updates via automated pipelines. One of its aspects, continuous integration, provides regular code merging and testing, which minimizes integration problems and detects errors proactively, while the other, continuous delivery and deployment, simplifies the release process by automating various procedures, such as testing, packaging, and deployment to various environments, including production. The main goal is to reduce delays, manual intervention, and enhance the quality and speed of software updates.

Overall, DevOps has largely a more extensive organizational purpose that encompasses unifying teams, processes, and culture with the ultimate goal of improving software delivery. On the flip side, the focus of continuous development is more specific and technical, as it is aimed at automating integration, testing, and deployment to make software updates swifter and more reliable. DevOps provides the environment for seamless collaboration and delivery, and CI/CD provides the tools and processes to achieve those delivery goals with maximum efficiency.

Key Development Practices

DevOps

Development and Operations processes ensure seamless integration between development, operations, quality assurance, and security teams through the entire software development and delivery lifecycle. Their goal is to unify workflows across teams, break down silos and ensure collaboration during all the stages of the lifecycle, from planning and development to deployment and maintenance.

• Automation Across All Stages
  Since automation plays a huge role for infrastructure as much as it does for code, DevOps implements such practices as infrastructure as code (IaC) and configuration management in order to provide consistency and scalability with automated environment provisioning and management.
• Continuous Improvement
  DevOps emphasizes monitoring and logging to obtain relevant information about application performance and operational health, which is further used to improve workflows and handle issues promptly.
• Policy-As-Code
  Another crucial element, policy-as-code, is aimed to guarantee that processes comply with organizational standards by using automatic supervision and implementing rules across resources.
• Iterative Development
  DevOps fosters iterative development, a process where small, gradual updates are frequently implemented and tested, which results in minimized risks and allows for faster issue resolution.
• Cultural Practices
  Beyond technical processes, DevOps promotes a holistic approach that extends to cultural practices. Key among these is fostering shared accountability and open communication within teams. This ensures that problems are addressed collaboratively, leading to better outcomes.

CI/CD

The CI/CD processes are far more specialized and technical: essentially focused on integration, testing, and code deployment automation.

• Continuous Integration (CI) ensures that developers regularly combine their code updates into one main project. Automated builds and tests monitor every single integration to help teams detect and tackle issues in the early stages of the development process. The key activities in CI enlist:
• Merging code changes into the main branch.
• Automated unit and integration tests execution.
• Creation of deployable code artifacts.
• Continuous Delivery (CD) adds to CI by automating the final steps required to prepare code for deployment across various environments. While code is automatically tested and prepared for release, switching to the production stage usually requires manual approval, a step that provides extra validation in key environments.
• The purpose of Continuous Deployment is to automate the processes throughout the entire pipeline. One of those processes is the release of code to production without manual intervention. Such a feature keeps the flow of updates smooth and uninterrupted, on condition that all pipeline stages are successfully completed.

The build pipelines usually involve specific stages—source, build, test, staging, and production. Those phases include automated tasks, namely:

• Infrastructure provision for deployment or testing.
• Execution of functional, performance, and integration tests.
• Artifact validation before progressing to the next stage.
• Tested code deployment to staging or production environments.

The ultimate goal of CI/CD is to reduce human error, improve delivery, and ensure high-quality software releases, while each pipeline stage serves as a checkpoint to verify the code.

Implementation Practices

DevOps

Implementing DevOps means adopting a workplace mindset and structure that integrates development, operations, quality assurance, and security teams. This process demands certain organizational changes in order to eliminate silos and ensure collaboration across teams.

Implementation typically involves the following practices:

• Unified approach: goals, ownership, and accountability are shared for the entire software lifecycle.
• Infrastructure as Code (IaC): infrastructure provisioning and management are automated with tools like Terraform or Ansible.
• Configuration Management: a guarantee of consistent setup and behavior across environments.
• Monitoring and Logging: tools such as Prometheus or ELK Stack are used for real-time performance tracking and issue detection.
• Policy-as-Code: automated compliance is ensured through encoding policies for security and resource usage.

The process of DevOps implementation often leverages multiple tools to support automation, collaboration, and scalability during development, testing, deployment, and operations. In this case, using DevOps consulting can streamline the adoption of such tools as Jenkins, Kubernetes, and Terraform while also fostering cultural transformation.

CI/CD

In contrast, the process of CI/CD implementation is more specialized and technical, consisting in design and configuration of pipelines that automate integration, testing, and deployment.

Its implementation primarily encompasses:

• Version control system establishment with systems like Git to manage code storage.
• Continuous integration tools, such as Jenkins, GitLab CI, or CircleCI, are utilized to automate builds and run tests when code changes occur.
• Pipeline stages definition and automation to ensure that code is transitioned smoothly from development to deployment.
• Automated testing frameworks integration, which ensures that code quality is verified at various stages, including unit, integration, and performance tests.
• Continuous delivery/deployment tools configuration – to implement updates into environments with optional manual approvals.

On the whole, to make the continuous software flow implementation possible, specific tools for automation are required (e.g. Docker for containerization/Helm for Kubernetes deployments). That being said, the process does not cover broader cultural changes or operational practices in the way that development operations does.

Stages: Key Differences

DevOps

As it was already established, DevOps has a much broader scope, therefore it encompasses a large number of lifecycle stages, from planning to production and maintenance. Collaboration, process optimization, and cultural alignment are the main focus of those stages, they are as follows:

1. Planning
   Teams maintain collaboration and shared accountability while defining project requirements, goals, and workflows.
2. Development
   Engineers write code utilizing iterative and agile approaches, with ownership shared across teams.
3. Build and Test
   DevOps uses tools for building and testing applications to maintain high quality. This stage often features configuration management and monitoring.
4. Release and Deployment
   Infrastructure as code (IaC) and automated pipelines are used to plan and perform deployment, while important releases frequently involve manual approvals.
5. Operations and Monitoring
   After the deployment stage, teams supervise application performance, ensure reliability, and manage production issues through logging and monitoring tools.
6. Feedback and Continuous Improvement
   Teams collect user feedback, assess system performance, and refine processes to enhance future releases.

The stages it encompasses are characterized by flexibility and focus on collaboration, automation, and constant improvement during all phases of the software lifecycle.

CI/CD

Meanwhile, the stages of automation workflow focuses on are majorly technical and confined to the software delivery pipeline, simplifying the code flow from development to deployment. Unlike development operations, these stages are more specific and automation-based. Here are the main ones:

1. Source
   Code is uploaded to a central repository (e.g., GitHub or GitLab), which automatically starts the pipeline.
2. Build
   The pipeline transforms the code into executable artifacts, manages dependencies, and packages the application for deployment.
3. Test
   Automated testing (e.g., unit, integration, performance tests) verifies code quality and functionality, checking for issues that block the pipeline.
4. Staging
   Built and tested artifacts are implemented into a simulated environment that mirrors the production stage, which allows for final validation before release is allowed.
5. Production
   After validation has occurred, the code is transferred to the production environment for the end users. This step could be automated through continuous deployment or handled manually when using continuous delivery.
6. Monitoring
   Although continuous pipelines are mainly a part of DevOps, they also incorporate automated checks and logging to monitor deployment success and identify regressions.

As demonstrated, CI/CD stages are by nature linear and technical, and they revolve around ensuring the code’s reliability and operational readiness through automation.

Which One to Choose: CI/CD or DevOps

So as to settle for either CI/CD or DevOps, one had better consider the scale of the organization’s goals and the issues that await resolution.

Choose DevOps If:

1. The goal of your organization is to improve collaboration and minimize silos between development, operations, and other teams. For instance, you work in large enterprises where separate teams are having trouble communicating and matching goals.
2. Your organization is switching to microservices or expanding the infrastructure for global users. In this case, DevOps provides an inclusive framework for managing the entire software lifecycle with all its stages, from planning to monitoring in production.
3. Your company utilizes tools like Kubernetes, Terraform, and Prometheus to unify workflows and enhance operations. Development operations would be the right choice if you need to foster the mentality of shared ownership and responsibility while scaling infrastructure with high-level efficiency.

Choose CI/CD If:

1. You’re majorly focused on making the processes of building, testing, and code deployment automated. CI/CD is the right choice if you are a part of a startup with the goal of releasing features at high speed and frequency with limited manual intervention.
2. Your organization prioritizes frequent updates with reliable automated testing. For instance, your teams are working on SaaS applications that demand daily or weekly updates to match user requirements.
3. Your goal is to improve the efficiency of specific technical workflows (e.g. reducing integration errors, and ensuring code quality). If your teams are using tools like Jenkins, GitLab CI, or CircleCI to automate testing and deployment processes, continuous pipelines are the better choice.

When to Use Both

1. Integrated approach
   To maximize efficiency, use DevOps as the foundational framework to ensure collaboration, align team goals, and implement integrated delivery pipelines to automate technical workflows within the said framework. This will work if you are part of a cloud-native enterprise that is currently implementing CI/CD pipelines within the DevOps culture to achieve swift releases with guaranteed scalability and reliability.
2. Transition to DevOps with CI/CD as a starting point
   If you are in the process of transition, start with CI/CD pipelines to automate urgent technical issues and then gradually move on to a development operations model to manage cultural and operational improvements at a greater scale.