10 Best Practices for Implementing CI/CD in Cloud Development

Ever wonder what makes this software development so fast and easy? Well, cloud technology helped make the process of software development easier. The technology also extends at a rapid scale. When the amalgamation of software development with the cloud was done, it gave altogether a new turn to the technology. Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery or CI/CD are the game changers in this turning point.

Whatever the case, there are generic practices that help teams develop, test, and deploy software efficiently. Whichever one it is, from being new to the concept of CI/CD to expanding on your existing pipeline, some best practices make this pipeline so reliable and secure in cloud-based software delivery.

1. Control Changes to Your Code with Version Control

Version control should be prime in any cloud computing development. Managing changes, tracking your progress, and working collaboratively with your team is indispensable. You can create a “single source of truth” for your coding base. Hence, this way, everyone will be working on the latest version.

You can handle changes in the code by using the branching strategy. You can separate your feature development from bug fixes and production-ready code. You would, therefore, reduce chances of conflict, and it would be easier for you to maintain a main codebase, stable, while multiple developers work on different tasks.

2. Automating Builds on the Cloud

What could be better than making the work easier? Automation of a build process is one of the cornerstones of CI/CD. And in a cloud environment, there’s plenty of tools that seamlessly integrate with cloud platforms, and can be configured to automatically build, test, and package your application every time changes are made to the codebase.

Automating the build can help you avoid manual errors while speeding up the development cycle and keeping your software deployable anytime. It will automatically compile your code, run tests, flag issues immediately, and let your team address the problems as they show up.

3. Integrate Continuous Testing into the Cloud Pipeline

Testing plays a very important role in cloud-based development as cloud environments can be different from on-premise environments and the software should work seamlessly in all cases. Implement automated testing frameworks into your CI/CD pipeline.

Automated tests at each step of the pipeline prevent harboring bugs earlier than needed. Unit tests, integration tests, and end-to-end tests assure that every part of your system works as it should while the whole application runs smoothly in a cloud. Basically, this process is of great importance since it keeps your software high in quality.

4. Manage Artifacts and Dependencies in the Cloud

In cloud based Services development, managing the code itself is at least as important as the science of managing the build artifacts and their dependencies. You can take advantage of using an artifact repository to store your software artifacts and dependencies in one place that your cloud-based pipeline can access.

This means that you remain with the same version right from development through testing to production, which reduces the chances of errors and inconsistencies across the environment.

5. Infrastructure Automation with Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC)

Infrastructure should be treated as a code in the cloud. Industry utilities, such as Terraform, AWS CloudFormation, or Google Cloud Deployment Manager, for instance, allow developers to define their infrastructure as code and automatically deploy it across diverse cloud environments.

This eliminates human configuration errors since your infrastructure is reproducible and consistent. IaC also allows you to validate, provision, update, and delete infrastructure resources such as servers, databases, or networks automatically faster, safer, and easier to manage.

6. Container Orchestration

Containers allow cloud applications to be portable and scalable, thus making them ideal for modern development practices. Tools like Kubernetes and Docker Swarm provide the user with the ability to manage the deployment, scaling, and orchestration of containerized applications.

These tools automate the process of deployments, which assures the smooth running of your applications across the board on different cloud environments. You can then deploy different deployment strategies, such as blue-green deployments or canary releases, which lower the risks that come with releasing new software versions. For instance, you would have two identical production environments running side by side: one live and one idle continuum of a blue-green deployment. Then, the new version gets deployed in the idle environment, and in case everything works fine, the traffic is flipped over to it. If there are problems, that’s okay. You can easily roll back to the previous environment.

7. Put Security First Down the Chain in CI/CD

For any cloud-based development, security needs to be at the forefront. Since your CI/CD pipeline has got sensitive data and deployment credentials, it is essential to have good security habits set up. Lock down your CI/CD pipeline with VPNs, enable two-factor authentication, and make use of identity management systems for blocking access to unauthorized users.

Bake security into every phase of your pipeline: perform security tests and audits at the level of the code, and ensure that your application meets the security standards before it deploys.

8. Automating the Right Tests First

As you embark on the automation process in the cloud CI/CD pipeline, the first important thing you have to do is prioritize tests that will be automated. Unit tests should be started first because they are fast and catch issues early on during development. Move on to perform integration and smoke tests to ensure that an application works over different parts of the system as expected.

Eventually, you can scale to test automation for more complex tests such as UI testing. Incremental automation allows for periods of time where you focus on test improvement without being overwhelmed by the amount of work required.

9. Release Frequently with Confidence

The big advantage to CI/CD is the frequency at which you can release software. That’s possible only if, at any point in time, your software is deployable. The only way you’re going to ensure that is by constantly testing your software before it goes live, using a production-like environment for tests.

You can safely manage frequent releases by either using canary release or A/B testing. This approach reduces many risks of frequent releases, thus you can confidently ensure the quality of your software.

10. Utilize Cloud-Based On-Demand Test Environments

Cloud platforms make it easy to create on-demand testing environments that can be spun up quickly for testing and then destroyed when no longer needed. Those ephemeral environments are usually container-based, so lightweight and easy to manage.

In this regard, using on-demand testing environments in the cloud will make sure your test environments mirror your production-like environments to the greatest extent possible with reduced chances of discrepancies and/or environment-specific bugs that might happen. In contrast, it increases test speed by eliminating manual configurations.

Final Words 

If you create a strong and agile pipeline for CI/CD, following these best practices will utilize all the advantages of cloud technologies. In such a way, combining a bit of automation, testing, security, and frequent releases will surely help you build better software much faster, with fewer errors.