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Automate the path from code change to production release.
Quick Definition
CI/CD is a DevOps practice that automates building, testing, and deploying code. Continuous integration merges and validates changes frequently, while continuous delivery or deployment pushes them to production reliably, accelerating release velocity and reducing manual error.
CI/CD stands for Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery. Continuous Integration merges and tests every code change automatically. Continuous Delivery packages those changes so they can be released to production quickly and safely, often many times a day.
It is the backbone of modern DevOps: small changes, tested automatically, shipped frequently, with less risk per release. There is also a cost dimension few teams watch: build servers, test environments, and artifact storage all consume cloud resources, and busy pipelines can become a quiet five-figure monthly line item.
Example. A team's test suite spins up a full environment for every pull request and forgets to tear some down. Adding automatic cleanup after each run cuts the pipeline's cloud cost by 40 percent without slowing a single build.
These CI/CD best practices cover the engineering side, and using ephemeral environments keeps the cost side honest.
Delivery makes every change releasable with a manual final step. Deployment removes that step and ships automatically.
Indirectly, yes: fewer failed releases and less manual work. Directly, pipelines have their own cloud cost that deserves monitoring.
Automated build, automated tests, artifact packaging, and a deployment step, with checks between each stage.