A Five‑Step Guide to Building a DevOps CI/CD Pipeline

DevOps has become the default answer for fixing slow, isolated, or abnormal software development processes, and this article explains what a DevOps pipeline is and offers a five‑step method to create one, providing a foundation for further learning.

The author, a former cloud‑team engineer, discovered DevOps principles in Greg Lavender’s recommended book "The Phoenix Project" and noted deployment frequencies of major companies (e.g., Amazon 23,000 times per day, Google 5,500, Netflix 500, Facebook once per day, Twitter three times per week, others once per nine months).

Before adopting DevOps, the team faced manual deployments to a single IBM WebSphere server, frequent server crashes when multiple users deployed simultaneously, low test coverage, and difficulty tracking deployments against tasks.

Collaborating with a colleague, they built an initial DevOps pipeline using Jenkins, a virtual machine, Tomcat, Atlassian Jira, and BitBucket, achieving near‑100 % uptime, automated builds, improved test coverage, and Git‑branch linkage to Jira tasks, primarily with open‑source tools.

DevOps is described as a cultural shift and software development lifecycle practice that emphasizes automation, increased deployment frequency, higher throughput, and greater flexibility, with continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) as essential components.

Step 1: Build a CI/CD framework – Jenkins, an open‑source Java‑based CI/CD tool under the MIT license, is introduced as a versatile controller that can orchestrate many services; other CI/CD tools such as Travis, CruiseControl, Buildbot, Apache Gump, and Cabie are mentioned.

Step 2: Source code management – Integrating an SCM tool is vital; Git is recommended as the standard, with alternatives like Subversion, CVS, Vesta, and Mercurial.

Step 3: Automated build tools – Build automation converts source code into deployable artifacts; common open‑source options include Maven, Ant, Gradle, Bazel (Java), and gruntjs, gulpjs (JavaScript).

Step 4: Web application servers – After building, a container such as Tomcat, Jetty, Wildfly, GlassFish, Django, or Node.js hosts the application.

Step 5: Code testing and coverage – Testing frameworks (e.g., JUnit, EasyMock, Mockito, PowerMock, pytest, Hypothesis, Tox) and quality tools (Cobertura, JaCoCo, Coverage.py) improve code quality; most tools target Java, Python, or JavaScript.

Optional steps – Containers (Docker, Kubernetes) provide lightweight deployment alternatives to VMs, and middleware automation tools (Ansible, SaltStack, Chef, Puppet) enable infrastructure‑as‑code for installing and managing middleware components.

In summary, start with a CI/CD tool, then progressively automate source control, builds, deployments, and testing using open‑source solutions, and explore additional automation such as containers and IaC to streamline team collaboration.