Chapter 2 The Importance of CI/CD in the DevOps Era Inside » Shifting to a continuous everything culture » The role of an opinionated continuous delivery pipeline » The importance of culture when implementing DevOps » Confronting the challenges of CI/CD in the cloud Colliding forces are dramatically impacting the world of software development. Increasingly, businesses are de- fining their value and brand based on customer applica- tions rather than employee-to-customer interactions and fueling the engine of their internal operations with soft- ware versus a manual process. For new businesses to suc- ceed, and for established companies to maintain and grow their position, software development must become the center of the universe. This new model of software development requires the combination of continuous de- velopment speed, agility to change business processes, and a predictable approach to management and security. In this chapter, we will explore the growing importance of continuous integration and continuous delivery as the foundation for application development and deployment. Defining CI/CD While continuous integration and continuous deploy- ment are linked together as though they were a single 23