An Overview of Different Automation Strategies Used in Cloud-Based CI/CD Pipelines for Software Deployment

Abstract

Modern application development and deployment has become exceedingly complex due to the rapid rise of cloud computing, the Internet of Things (IoT), and distributed software systems. The traditional software delivery architecture and centralized design can barely meet the requirement to handle huge amounts of data, the frequent code updates, and the dynamic architecture requirements. Automation, collaboration, and rapid software development have emerged as powerful tools for overcoming these challenges, thanks to the ideas of DevOps and CI/CD pipelines. This research paper delves deeply into cloud-based continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines, specifically focusing on automation solutions that improve software deployment efficiency, reliability, and scalability. It addresses the fundamentals of CI/CD, the key aspects of automation, such as build automation, automated testing, infrastructure automation, deployment automation, and security automation (DevSecOps) and the most popular tools that support such operations. Dependency management, interoperability of tools, security, and complexity of the multi-cloud are already existing problems that are discussed in the paper, as well. It also sheds some light on the new trends, such as AI/ML-powered CI/CD optimization and GitOps-powered deployments, which smarter and self-healing software delivery pipelines that are more secure. Researchers and practitioners able to use the review's organized picture of present practices and future research directions to better understand how automation is advancing in modern software systems' cloud-based CI/CD pipelines.