Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) and DevOps are two terms that a lot of people think it’s the same thing or they are synonyms. In fact CI/CD and DevOps are different. In this post we will talk about the difference between CI/CD and DevOps and how they are related.
Before starting with the difference we would like to mention that the aim of both CI/CD and DevOps are the same. Which is to make software development more efficient and delivered with high quality.
The difference between CI/CD and DevOps
Now let’s talk about the difference between CI/CD and DevOps. Let’s begin with DevOps:
DevOps
DevOps is a philosophy that is meant to follow specific practices and processes to make the organization able to deliver applications faster than the traditional process. In other words, DevOps is a way of thinking. A “mindset”. Note that DevOps is not really a modern term, in particular with widely adopted Secure DevOps or DevSecOps under the context, but for this post, we continue to use DevOps.
CI/CD
CI/CD is the practice of automating the software development lifecycle (SDLC) to frequently deliver applications. CI/CD provide tools that allow the development team to work together in a shared environment.
How CI/CD and DevOps are related
Even Though CI/CD and DevOps are different they are related to each other. DevOps is used as a way of thinking while CI/CD is the tool to implement this mindset. Let’s take open-source as an example. Open source is a mindset that aims to share code in public to let people make use of it or study it or any other possible reasons while GitLab is the tool to apply this mindset.
Summary
CI/CD and DevOps have the same goal which is to deliver efficient and high quality software. The difference between CI/CD and DevOps is that DevOps is a mindset while CI/CD is the tool to implement the mindset. Although CI/CD and DevOps are different, they are related to each other.
For instance, we will say the company is undertaking DevOps initiative (in modern, most likely is secure DevOps, or DevSecOps), but in execution, it is about implementing CI/CD tool chain for it.
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