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What is CI/CD? Continuous Integration and Deployment Explained

Understand the pipeline that takes your code from a local commit to a live production deployment — automatically.

12 min readdevops, cicd, automation, pipelines

You just finished a feature. It works on your machine. You push the code to GitHub. And then... what? Someone has to review it, run the tests, build the project, deploy it to a server, and hope nothing breaks along the way.

If that process involves you manually running commands, copying files, or SSHing into a server — you're doing it the hard way. And the hard way doesn't scale. The hard way breaks at 2 AM on a Friday when you accidentally deploy the wrong branch.

CI/CD exists to automate everything between your git push and your users seeing the new feature. It's the assembly line of modern software development.

Breaking Down the Acronym

CI/CD is actually two related concepts that work together:

Continuous Integration (CI)

Continuous Integration is the practice of automat

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