DevOps & Delivery

DevOps started as a cultural idea: the people who build software and the people who run it should share goals, tools, and on-call pagers. In practice it has become a toolchain for one question — how does a commit become running software, safely, many times a day?

This hub covers that path: continuous integration, delivery pipelines, deployment strategies, and infrastructure defined as code. Containers and Kubernetes have their own hub at Containers & Kubernetes, and monitoring and incident work live in Observability & SRE.

TL;DR

• Integrate continuously. Every commit builds and runs tests automatically; main is always releasable.
• Deploy with a strategy, not a prayer — rolling, blue-green, or canary, with a fast rollback.
• Define infrastructure in code. Reviewed, versioned, and reproducible beats clicked-together.
• Let Git be the source of truth for what should be running (GitOps).
• Measure delivery with DORA metrics: deployment frequency, lead time, change failure rate, time to restore.
• Pave the road. Platform engineering turns good practice into the default path.

The Delivery Pipeline

Continuous integration covers everything up to a tested artifact. Continuous delivery keeps that artifact always deployable; continuous deployment ships it automatically. The loop closes when production signals flow back to the team.

Featured Topics

CI/CD Fundamentals

• CI/CD — Pipelines, stages, artifacts, and the practices behind them
• Deployment Strategies — Rolling, blue-green, canary, and feature-flag releases
• GitOps — Git as the source of truth, reconciled by Argo CD or Flux

CI/CD Platforms

• GitHub Actions — Workflows built into GitHub
• GitLab CI — Integrated pipelines in GitLab
• Jenkins — The self-hosted automation server
• CircleCI — Hosted CI/CD with strong caching and parallelism

Infrastructure as Code

• Infrastructure as Code — Declarative vs imperative, state, drift, and review
• Infrastructure Fundamentals — Servers, networks, and environments you're automating
• Terraform — Multi-cloud provisioning with HCL
• OpenTofu — The open-source Terraform fork
• Pulumi — Infrastructure in general-purpose languages
• CloudFormation — AWS-native templates
• Ansible — Agentless configuration management

Platforms

• Platform Engineering — Internal developer platforms and golden paths

Choosing Tools

Common Mistakes

🚫 Slow pipelines — A 40-minute CI run means people batch changes and skip feedback. Cache dependencies and parallelize tests.

🚫 Snowflake environments — Staging that differs from production hides bugs. Build both from the same code.

🚫 Manual hotfixes in the console — They create drift that the next terraform apply silently reverts or fights.

🚫 Deploys without a rollback plan — Every deployment strategy should answer "how do we undo this in two minutes?"

🚫 Secrets in pipeline YAML — Use the platform's secret store or a secrets manager, with scoped, short-lived credentials.

Learning Path

Beginner

Learn Git and Linux basics. Build a GitHub Actions workflow that runs tests on every pull request.

Intermediate

Add build artifacts, environments, and a deployment strategy. Provision a small environment with Terraform and review changes with plan.

Advanced

Adopt GitOps for Kubernetes, track DORA metrics, and build a platform with golden-path templates.

Related Topics

• Containers & Kubernetes — What most pipelines build and deploy
• Observability & SRE — Knowing whether a deploy worked
• Cloud Computing — Where the infrastructure runs
• Testing — The checks that make CI meaningful