Comparison
Build pipelinevsContinuous integration
Build pipeline
a merge triggers a sequence of stages on someone else's machine, and the sequence is now the only way anything reaches production.
The automated sequence that turns a commit into a tested, published artefact and then into a deployment. It is infrastructure in its own right — it has uptime, capacity, credentials and a blast radius — and it is usually the most privileged system a team operates while receiving the least operational attention. Its slowness is a direct tax on every change, which is why build time is a reliability metric rather than a convenience one.
Full entry →Continuous integration
your change was merged and verified against everyone else's within the hour, not at the end of the sprint.
The practice of integrating everyone's work into a shared mainline frequently, with automated verification each time. The important half is the practice, not the server: a team with a build pipeline and week-long branches is not doing continuous integration, whatever the tool is called. The value is that integration problems are found while they are small and while the person who caused them still remembers the change.
Full entry →