What are CI and CD tools?
CI stands for Continuous Integration and CD stands for Continuous Deployment. These are a part of the modern day software development practices.
The million $ question is are CI and CD the same? Well, definitely not, though there is a big intersection between both of them. CI (Continuous Integration) is a known practice where the changes made by the developers are pushed & merged to the main branch (or prod branch) as much as possible.
On the other hand, CD (Continuous Deployment) is an extension of CI. Here, the changes on the respective environments (i.e. prod, stage, etc.) are merged after the changes are validated via automation scripts that are a part of the CI/CD pipeline.
The combination of CI/CD ensures that developers are able to release stable code that has undergone a number of rigorous automated testing cycles. Jenkins, Circle CI, Semaphore CI, GitLab CI, etc. are some of the most prominent CI/CD tools used by developers and enterprises alike.