Declarative: With the declarative approach, the desired state of the
system is defined and then the system executes all the steps that need
to happen in order to attain the desired state.
Imperative: The imperative approach defines a set of commands that
have to be executed in a certain order for the system to achieve the
desired state.A popular infrastructure as code solution is Terraform
from HashiCorp. Infrastructure as code integrates very
well in the continuous integration/continuous delivery
pipelines discussed next.
CONTINUOUS
INTEGRATION/CONTINUOUS
DELIVERY PIPELINES
Software is quickly becoming pervasive in all aspects of
our lives. From smartphones to smart cars and smart
homes, we interact with software hundreds or even
thousands of times each day. Under the DevOps
umbrella, there have been several efforts to improve
software development processes in order to increase the
speed, reliability, and accuracy of software development.
Continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD)
pipelines address all these requirements and more. All
the software development processes—from writing code
to building, testing, and deploying—were manually
performed for years, but CI/CD pipelines can be used to
automate these steps. Based on specific requirements for
each company, different tools and different solutions are
used to implement these pipelines. Some companies
implement only continuous integration solutions, and
others take advantage of the whole CI/CD pipeline,
automating their entire software development process.
CI/CD is a series of automated steps that code goes
through from the IDE of the individual developer,
through building, testing, and finally deployment to