A CI/CD pipeline is the automated workflow that helps teams integrate, test, secure and deploy software more efficiently. It can refer to Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery, or Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment, depending on how far automation extends into release.
A strong CI/CD pipeline does more than move code quickly. It improves delivery speed, reduces manual error, supports software quality and gives teams a more reliable path from development through to production. As DevOps practices mature, modern CI/CD pipelines are evolving beyond simple build-and-deploy automation to include stronger security, observability, cloud-native tooling and continuous improvement.
This guide explains what a CI/CD pipeline is, how it works, the key benefits it delivers, and the best practices modern teams should use to build pipelines that support speed, quality and resilience.
What Is a CI/CD Pipeline?
A CI/CD pipeline is a structured process that automates key stages of software delivery, including integration, testing, deployment, and release. A well-designed CI/CD pipeline helps teams improve delivery speed, reduce manual errors, and maintain software quality as products evolve.
Key Benefits of a CI/CD Pipeline
A modern CI/CD pipeline helps teams release software faster, improve consistency, reduce deployment risk, and respond more quickly to user feedback. It also supports better collaboration between development, operations, and security teams by embedding automation and shared responsibility into the delivery process.
Why CI/CD Pipelines Enable Faster, Lower-Risk Delivery
From a business perspective, CI/CD ultimately gives your organization a competitive advantage. It brings together the different aspects of what it takes to build and run software from a DevOps perspective.
A CI/CD pipeline helps development teams deliver software faster, more consistently, and with less risk. As engineering practices mature, the modern CI/CD pipeline is evolving beyond simple build-and-deploy automation to include stronger security, cloud-native tooling, observability, and continuous improvement.
In this article, we look at how CI/CD pipelines are evolving, what that means for modern DevOps teams, and how businesses can build a pipeline that supports speed, quality, and resilience.
CI/CD Pipeline Best Practices
One of the biggest mistakes that I’ve seen in the creation of CI/CD pipelines is the mindset that reaching the “finish line” and getting your new code deployed somewhere fast, is the main success factor. When your pipeline appears to be deploying your software and reaching the end goal, it is tempting for your development teams to think that you’ve reached the desired outcome.
However, if you want to ensure that quality and security are embedded into your product and it meets and exceeds your customers’ expectations, how you get there is just as important as actually getting there. You need to look at the pipeline ecosystem as a whole and carefully plan all the steps that need to happen before a deployment, including for example rigorous unit testing, integration testing, Quality Assurance and a DevSecOps approach to security, to eliminate vulnerabilities.
This will help your DevOps teams to build the most robust pipeline possible. CI/CD is based on a set of principles that should be shared, understood and agreed to enable a way of working that, if executed properly, will enable high quality, innovative software delivery.
The main principles are:
- Create reliable and repeatable processes
- Automate wherever possible
- Create version control with a shared code base
- Embed testing and quality assurance in every step
- Prioritise the hardest parts and avoid procrastination
- Every team member accepts responsibility and accountability
- Focus on the customer
- Define “done” as when the whole team’s work is complete and the customer has the software in their hands
- Go beyond Continuous Integration, Continuous Delivery and Continuous Deployment to achieve Continuous Improvement.
One of the challenges I see for a lot of our clients’ teams is that, over time, they become over reliant on their tools and forget the principles. It’s important to remember that the tools are only in place to enable the principles in action. To gain a competitive advantage, teams need to adjust their mindset and focus on these principles.
Introducing Continuous Improvement is an excellent way to challenge ways of thinking and advise new, better, behaviours and practises, enabling a highly automated, secure pipeline that rapidly delivers the kind of quality software that genuinely delights end users.
How to Keep a CI/CD Pipeline Secure
There are many great tools out there that can be integrated into the CI/CD pipeline to conduct security testing for you. However, one of the biggest security considerations when building a CI/CD pipeline is the attitude of the developers. Unfortunately, in some instances, developers overlook the importance of security in favour of increasing the ease of working on the pipeline and providing quick access to other developers.
The pipeline is a high-risk threat vector to a company, so to prevent compromising data and to mitigate potential risks, it’s helpful to treat the pipeline like any other customer-facing service and then apply the same IT Security policies to it.
Implementing DevSecOps by helping your DevOps teams build a security first culture where security is a shared responsibility and is embedded into your code repository, production environment, test environments, automation strategy and every other aspect of the software development lifecycle, will help you achieve this.
Companies should also frequently update their Information Security Management System (ISMS) and, as part of that, include role-based permissions around the CI/CD pipeline and infrastructure that it has access to. Ultimately, security has to be a top priority.
The CI/CD Pipeline Skills Gap Challenge
One of the biggest challenges facing CI/CD today is the skills gap. With a growing number of CI and CD Tools on the market, Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment are more accessible than ever. CI/CD Pipelines are becoming easier to set up, without requiring much knowledge or experience. The problem then is, when developers don’t find the right CD tool to do a particular job, that job can get missed from the pipeline, which can reduce the quality of controls, or require manual workarounds.
It’s really important that developers understand it’s their CI/CD pipeline. They are accountable for it and have to improve and develop it just as they would with any other software delivery. They need an attitude of relentless automation so they can solve problems themselves and automate steps that don’t have any existing tools available. You need multi-skilled engineers.
To combat these challenges, when hiring, look for those with the aspiration to learn new aspects of the CI/CD pipeline. While you can hire individuals with specialisms, it needs to be made clear that their knowledge needs to be shared among the wider group. Not only does this help to avoid bottlenecks if certain issues start to stack up in a particular area, it also helps to advance the team’s overall understanding of the whole CI/CD process, while improving the entire CI/CD pipeline.
How Modern CI/CD Pipelines Are Evolving
Previously developers owned and set up all the Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment infrastructure themselves. The modern approach is not to build the CI/CD pipeline from scratch. The most successful teams are developing robust, sustainable and cloud native CI/CD pipelines through cloud providers like GitLab, Bitbucket or Github.
As the number of tools and third-party integrations available in the market-place increase, we need to be flexible and open to changing the processes we use to create, execute and improve the CI/CD pipeline. Whereas previously software engineers would collect results and store the data of each step in the build ourselves, we are now relying on third party services to handle this aspect, enabling us to focus better on the new code, the end product and the end user.
While these third-party services increase the speed of delivery, I do have concerns that it can sometimes further shift DevOps teams’ and other stakeholders’ attention purely onto development and the rapid shipping of code, at the expense of the Operations aspect of DevOps.
To assuage this concern, when the Catapult CX team implements a CI/CD pipeline for a client, we create service dashboards with observability, real-time data, and metrics denoting the service level.
This helps to ensure that Operations are an integral part of the feedback loop and improves the efficacy of DevOps and ultimately the quality of the product delivered to our clients’ customers.
Craig Cook, Principal Engineer, Catapult CX
DevOps Institute Ambassador
CI/CD Pipeline FAQs
What is a CI/CD pipeline?
A CI/CD pipeline is an automated workflow that helps software teams integrate code, run tests, apply checks and deploy changes more efficiently. It reduces manual effort, improves consistency and helps teams release software with less risk.
How does a CI/CD pipeline work?
A CI/CD pipeline usually starts when code is committed to a shared repository. The pipeline then runs automated build steps, tests, and validation checks before deploying the software to staging or production. In stronger pipelines, security testing, approval controls and monitoring are also built into the process.
Why is a CI/CD pipeline important?
A CI/CD pipeline improves delivery speed, reduces deployment errors and makes software releases more repeatable. It also helps teams maintain quality by embedding testing, automation and shared responsibility into the delivery lifecycle.
What are CI/CD pipeline best practices?
The strongest CI/CD pipelines are built around repeatable processes, automation, version control, embedded testing, shared accountability and continuous improvement. The goal is not just to deploy quickly, but to create a reliable and secure way to deliver software at pace.
How do you secure a CI/CD pipeline?
A CI/CD pipeline should be treated like a high-risk operational system. That means applying role-based access, protecting secrets, integrating security testing, limiting permissions and embedding DevSecOps practices throughout the pipeline and the wider software delivery lifecycle.
How are modern CI/CD pipelines evolving?
Modern CI/CD pipelines are evolving through increased automation, cloud-native tooling, stronger DevSecOps practices, wider use of third-party services and more emphasis on observability. The better ones are also shifting beyond deployment speed alone and focusing more on resilience, operational feedback and continuous improvement.
What is the difference between continuous delivery and continuous deployment?
Continuous delivery means code is always ready to be released, but production deployment still requires a deliberate decision. Continuous deployment goes a step further by automatically releasing every change that passes the required checks in the production pipeline.
