What is continuous integration and continuous distribution?

- [Instructor] It has been touted that one of the keys to being able to release software quickly is DevOps, and the ability to create automated build and release processes. To help with this, Visual Studio App Center provides some basic tools for build and release automation. Before explaining how VSAC handles this, we will do a baseline of some of the terms for the purposes of this course to avoid confusion, as some of these terms do not have agreed-upon, industry-standard definitions. The first term is continuous integration, or CI.

A CI build assures that its developers merge code they're working on into the shared code base. That code meets certain quality standards so that the rest of the team is not negatively impacted by it. This can mean that the code compiles, passes some level of static analysis, or even that it passes some automated unit or integration testing. The second term is continuous delivery. For our purposes, this means that code is built and sent out to any group other than a production environment.

Some quality checks may be part of a continuous delivery build, with its primary purpose is to get software out to some team, usually for quality assurance or user acceptance testing. The last term is continuous deployment. Like continuous delivery, a continuous deployment build creates a build that is distributed. However, its purpose is to distribute to a production environment, such as the app stores or to a private enterprise store for production use. Visual Studio App Center has support for all these build types, and it's all done at how we can figure our Git branches.

As our code moves through the Git branches, the proper type of build is kicked off, whether it be continuous integration, continuous delivery, or continuous deployment.