Top CI/CD Patterns And Practices for DevOps Teams

As the software go-to-market times and update cycles continue to shrink, it is becoming evident that DevOps engineers need to ensure that their CI/CD pipelines are optimally refined. Considering the inflating security threats and architecture complexity, it is indeed difficult to maintain velocity. 

Having said that, it is equally important to align with the business goals, and thus, the experts at Talent500 have curated this article with top CI/CD patterns + best practices. These best practices will help nurture the autonomy and transparency in CI/CD pipelines as well as ease their maintenance. It will help DevOps teams brush off their basics and rethink CI/CD from a DevOps perspective. 

Let’s get started.

#1 Pipeline As Code

In this pattern, the pipeline works on logic containerized runners. This helps your CI/CD platform handle a broad spectrum of workloads while allowing them to have a separate build environment for their respective requirements. It is stored with the infrastructure code in the form of code. This eliminates the GUI setup steps, and hence, the DevOps engineers can work on the pipeline with the same branching strategies as the application code. Here, the build environments are based on the trusted Docker images used by the Container image provenance. The configuration of the CI runner is based on automation, and it can accommodate any increase in demand as it is constantly on standby mode. Moreover, the secrets are stored outside the pipeline with outputs obscured to ensure security.

#2 Build And Deploy Model

The build and deploy model is one of the simplest ones as it aims at developing a prototype first and deploying it. While it can be reused over and over again, other benefits include its environment-agnostic attribute and that every piece of code, including the infrastructure code, is combined together in a versioned package.

#3 Stable Internal Releases

This is a safer CI/CD pattern where only the tested, versioned packages are deployed by automated/human triggers. Some of its proprietary qualities include an exclusive ephemeral environment dedicated to the branches. This pattern facilitates deployment/destruction and triggers by automated/manual events of the versioned packages. Another important feature of this pattern is reflected in the CI runners’ ability to use cloud-native IAM attributes for creating permissions temporarily to assume the right roles and permissions to ensure workload completion.

#4 Faster Team Feedback

As the name indicates, this CI/CD pattern is optimized to receive feedback/issue reports from the DevOps team members with speed at the center. It allows DevOps teams to receive team-wide notifications on multiple channels like chat, email and dashboards via a pull request which is one of the most sought-after benefits of this model. To enable this, each commit triggers a respective pipeline that is run with high time efficiency. Each successful run contributes to the generation of a versioned package of the code accompanied by the static analysis results. 

#5 Buttoned-Up Releases

This is yet another popular CI/CD pipeline where DevOps teams create small portions of code and integrate them in multiple steps. In this case, the paper trail is completely transparent, and the DevOps teams can release the packages on demand in combination with external APIs to consider if the build should be released or paused. However, this requires the team to keep dependencies in mind since the CI/CD pipeline isn’t linear.

#6 Test Automation Pattern

It is necessary that automation is ingrained early in the development lifecycle and across the architecture layers. It helps DevOps teams keep a tab on changes and monitor their outcomes while fast-tracking regression testing. However, it is noteworthy that automated tests shouldn’t replace certain manual tests like usability and exploratory tests. Most experts recommend using a special pipeline to solely automate the testing process. Failing to do so may lead to using expensive workarounds and compromising the overall vision behind implementing DevOps.

#7 Externalizing Logic into Reusable Libraries

Leveraging reusable libraries to eliminate work duplication is common among DevOps teams. They encompass general pipeline logic, including reports, and can be developed; unit tested individually. Many tools, including npm and Rake, can be used to maintain congruence between the local and CI workflows by calling external tasks. Since these pipeline libraries are well-documented and discoverable, they make an excellent choice for releasable software code snippet alternatives.

7 CI/CD Best Practices

In this section, we will go through seven CI/CD best practices that will help DevOps engineers stay in line with their long-term objectives:

1. Always make it a point to take feedback with utmost sincerity and motivate the stakeholders to share it with the team regardless of their scope of work.
2. It would be best if your team could use GitOps in combination with Jira/Bugzilla to implement version control and track issues.
3. One of the important aspects of any CI/CD pipeline is to ensure the system’s security and stability. Hence, incorporate DevSecOps in your strategic and functioning aspects.
4. As mentioned earlier, prioritize testing early and figure out which processes need the maximum attention; prefer on-demand testing environments 
5. Since it is natural that each new release might expose the software to security risks, a well-thought release and rollback strategy must be in place at all times.
6. Another best practice that improves your team’s productivity is committing daily to the main branch or merging the changes from its local branches. 
7. Lay emphasis on making frequent releases through Canary deployment, blue-green deployment, and A/B testing.

Summing Up

An important learning for DevOps engineers comes from the realization that CI/CD is a tool to gain a competitive advantage in the business landscape.  CI/CD helps address multiple areas like improving the product, its stability, security, and quality while automating relevant processes and fostering governance. We hope that this article helps you get a fresh perspective and that it will help your future career trajectory. 

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