Cloud Drops - What is Continuous Integration (CI)?
Modern software teams use version control branches so engineers can develop independently without blocking each other. Continuous Integration formalises the step of merging those branches back into the main codebase by requiring every change to pass an automated build and test suite before it can be accepted. Tools like GitHub Actions and Azure Pipelines automate compilation, unit tests, integration tests, and other quality checks triggered on every pull request, providing rapid feedback — if a build breaks or tests fail, the engineer knows immediately rather than discovering hard-to-trace bugs later in production.
CI applies beyond application code: Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, Bicep, ARM), database migration scripts, and data science notebooks all benefit from the same small-and-frequent-change discipline. The pull request workflow adds peer review as a complementary human gate alongside automated checks, enabling teams to collaborate across feature silos while maintaining a protected, deployable main branch at all times.
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