What Is Continuous Integration in DevOps?
In DevOps, Continuous Integration (CI) involves automating the building and deploying code every time a developer in a team commits code to version control. Developers share code by merging all changes to a shared repository, including the smallest changes. Every time code is committed, it initiates an automated pipeline that retrieves that latest code and proceeds to build, test, and validate the main or trunk branch.
CI was imagined and implemented as a best practice to tackle a specific problem. When the coder worked in isolation and had to integrate changes with the team's codebase at the end of days or weeks, they found it led to frequent merge conflicts, frustrating bugs, incompatible coding strategies, and duplications.