A Google Product Management Lead on What CI/CD Really Means

The term CI/CD can mean many things to many people, sometimes only referring in general terms to software development and deployment. Too often, it is buried in marketing speak, with only vague connotations in relation to CI/CD’s true meaning: as a way to combine continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD). Michael Winser, product management lead for Google’s Cloud Build, described what CI/CD means for Google as well as the term’s meaning for the software industry. He discussed that and the emergence of continuous integration and continuous delivery and their combination during the past decades, for this latest episode of The New Stack Makers podcast, hosted by Alex Williams, founder and editor-in-chief of The New Stack, recorded in New York last week. CI and CD are increasingly used interchangeably as software is deployed at scale, Winser said. “The terms get used together because the lines are a little bit blurry depending upon how you’re building your software, what kind of software you’re doing and you might have different processes,” Winser said. “But the way I think about it is ultimately CI is an automated approach towards verification, towards correctness of your software at the time of merging it.”