By Gavin Postlewaight, Senior Operations Engineer, CI/CD Lead

Last year, my friend treated me to a drive-in his Tesla. Upon parking, he showed me a new feature that had downloaded overnight: Dog mode. This little feature, which he activated as we exited the car, keeps the interior air conditioning running, maintaining an interior temperature safe for dogs. At the same time, a dashboard display alerts passers-by that they don’t need to be concerned about the animal’s wellbeing.

Now, dogs and electric cars might feel far removed from the mission-critical business of airport operations, but this feature is a great example and tangible demonstration of the principle of Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD). Developing and testing new features, then seamlessly rolling them out into production code to be accepted by the customer when it best suits, could potentially benefit airports even more than it does Tesla drivers and their dogs.

CI/CD – say what?

In DevOps, there can be a level of disconnect between the development team’s code-building and the operational team’s deployment thereof. With CI/CD best practices in place, this gap is easily closed. CI/CD-based DevOps can lead to dramatic changes and innovation; for example, Paypal, Adobe, Netflix, Amazon, Facebook and Walmart have all implemented this kind of DevOps at scale, and have consequently reaped competitive advantages.

In essence, a CI/CD pipeline is all about automation, enabling developers to release changes and new features more frequently. Simultaneously, it gives the operations team confidence that they can get those features in front of customers faster, while maintaining quality and stability.

Continuous Integration

In this brave new world of software development, continuous integration allows developers to build and test code before committing it to the version control repository. Once changes are made to the repository, it is possible to integrate source code into a build. If the build is successful, automated unit tests are executed, followed by system tests in a test environment.

Developers don’t have to worry when making changes, as feedback is rapid and problems are easily identified when they arise. Changes don’t deploy until they are built and tested in a repeatable fashion.

And Continuous Delivery?

Continuous delivery is the twin of continuous Integration and picks up where CI ends. Where CI is the automatic build and test process, CD deploys all code changes in a build to the customer’s User Acceptance Testing (UAT) environment. Continuous delivery is about keeping the application deployable at any point. For our customers, this means enabling release directly to a test or production environment, once the latest version passes all automated tests and if – and only if – you are ready for the update.

For Veovo, our investment in CI/CD is a natural extension of our strong DevOps collaboration heritage, that has allowed us to quickly build, test, and deploy software. As customers deploy or migrate to the new-generation Veovo platform, continuous integration and delivery processes will ensure immediate access to new releases, with little resource overhead and no impact to their operations.

If you are interested in learning more about our CI/CD approach and the benefits of an Airport Operations platform that can be seamlessly and regularly updated, please get in touch.