Overview of CI/CD

Let's take a high-level overview of the CI/CD process and its relevance to network automation.

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Overview

The final phase of network automation is to continuously integrate (CI) and continuously deliver (CD) the Ansible playbooks into the production network. CI is the software development practice adopted for network automation. CI allows for teams to collaborate on code, integrate their changes often using Git commits and pull requests, and create automated builds whenever there are changes made to the master branch.

CD expands on the CI capability and automatically releases, the automated builds to the network on a scheduled release. This schedule could be as frequent as hourly, nightly, or weekly. The general principle of CI/CD is that developers only need to worry about making changes to the code , and about not how to document, integrate, or release it. The CI/CD pipeline and the automation engine take care of this for them. This often has the side-effect of removing network operations from the equation.

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