DevOps & CI/CD

DevOps is a cultural and technical movement that bridges the gap between development and operations teams. It emphasizes collaboration, automation and continuous improvement. Continuous integration and continuous delivery/deployment (CI/CD) pipelines automate the building, testing and deployment of software, enabling rapid, reliable releases.

Why use DevOps?

• Shorter development cycles: Integrated teams and automated pipelines reduce the time between writing code and delivering value to users.
• Improved quality: Automated tests detect regressions early, resulting in more stable software and fewer production incidents.
• Greater collaboration: Shared ownership, visibility and feedback loops align developers, QA and operations around common goals.
• Faster recovery: Small, frequent deployments make it easier to identify and roll back problematic changes.

Key Practices

• Version control: Use distributed systems like Git to track changes, collaborate and integrate code from multiple contributors.
• Continuous integration: Automatically build and test code on every commit. Tools like Jenkins, GitHub Actions and GitLab CI run test suites and ensure code quality before changes are merged.
• Continuous delivery/deployment: Automate packaging and deployment to staging/production environments. Continuous delivery ensures the application can be released at any time; continuous deployment automatically releases changes that pass tests.
• Infrastructure as Code (IaC): Define infrastructure using code (e.g., Terraform, CloudFormation, Ansible) so environments are reproducible and version‑controlled.
• Monitoring & observability: Collect metrics, logs and traces to understand how applications behave in real time. Use tools like Prometheus, Grafana and ELK/EFK stacks.
• ChatOps: Integrate bots and automation into chat platforms (Slack, Microsoft Teams) to trigger deployments, view logs and perform operations via chat.

Common Tools

• CI/CD platforms: Jenkins, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI/CD, CircleCI and Azure DevOps support automated pipelines.
• Containerization: Docker packages applications and dependencies; Kubernetes orchestrates containers across clusters.
• Configuration management: Ansible, Chef and Puppet automate provisioning and configuration.
• Infrastructure automation: Terraform and CloudFormation codify cloud resources for consistent deployment.

Free Resources

• GitHub Actions – Integrated CI/CD platform for GitHub repositories.
• Jenkins – Open‑source automation server for building and deploying software.
• GitLab CI/CD – End‑to‑end DevOps platform with built‑in CI/CD pipelines.
• Docker – Open platform for containerizing applications.
• Kubernetes – Container orchestration for scalable deployment.
• Prometheus & Grafana – Open‑source monitoring and serviceability stack.
• Terraform – Infrastructure‑as‑code tool for provisioning and managing infrastructure.