Automating Container Deployments Using CI/CD

Abstract

The biggest challenge faced by information technology (IT) industry is of the deployment and release, traditional methods used to release the final build as a part of deployment process, along with deployment of the database and code on the on premise infrastructure which was a long and cumbersome process, then with advent of cloud computing, things became easy, and the infrastructure was shifted from on premises to cloud, this made the on demand access of resources just a matter of clicks, but still deployment was a problem due to a major reason of “Code working on developer’s machine but not working properly in staging or production environments”. Primary reasons included versioning problems, software patches or bug fixes. It also had various problems such as scalability issues, the infrastructures were not fault tolerant as well as lack of disaster recovery strategy in place. With advent of containerization, the platform dependency issues were resolved, but again deployment release and rolling updates are a major issue with them as well. This paper focuses on high level overview about how CI/CD could solve the problem of deployment and rolling upgrades by automating the entire build and deployment process, as well as to handle the rolling updates process in an effective manner. It also provides a way of implementing the disaster recovery strategy regardless of the underlying cloud platform as well as fault tolerance mechanism if in case any failure occurs in staging or production environments.