Utilize cloud-based CI/CD – Continuous Integration with GitHub Actions and Jenkins

Consider adopting cloud -based CI/CD services such as AWS CodePipeline, Google Cloud Build, Azure DevOps, or Travis CI for enhanced scalability and performance. Harness on-demand cloud resources to expand parallelization capabilities and adapt to varying workloads.

Monitor and profile your CI/CD pipelines

Implement performance monitoring and profiling tools to identify bottlenecks and areas for improvement within your CI/CD pipeline. Regularly analyze build and test logs to gather insights for optimizing performance.

Pipeline optimization

Continuously review and optimize your CI/CD pipeline configuration for efficiency and relevance.

Remove unnecessary steps or stages that do not contribute significantly to the process.

Implement automated cleanup

Implement automated cleanup routines to remove stale artifacts, containers, and virtual machines, preventing resource clutter. Regularly purge old build artifacts and unused resources to maintain a tidy environment.

Documentation and training

Document best practices and performance guidelines for your CI/CD processes, ensuring that the entire team follows these standards consistently. Provide training and guidance to team members to empower them to implement and maintain these optimization strategies effectively.

By implementing these strategies, you can significantly enhance the speed, efficiency, and reliability of your CI/CD pipeline, ultimately leading to smoother software development and delivery processes. These are some of the best practices at a high level, and they are not exhaustive, but they are good enough so that you can start optimizing your CI environment.

Summary

This chapter covered CI, and you understood the need for CI and the basic CI workflow for a container application. We then looked at GitHub Actions, which we can use to build an effective CI pipeline. Next, we looked at the Jenkins open source offering and deployed a scalable Jenkins on Kubernetes with Kaniko, setting up a Jenkins controller-agent model. We then understood how to use hooks for automating builds, both in the GitHub Actions- based workflow and the Jenkins-based workflow. Finally, we learned about build performance best practices and dos and don’ts.

By now, you should be familiar with CI and its nuances, along with the various tooling you can use to implement it.