DevOps & CI/CD — Pipelines, Infrastructure as Code, Observability, and Release Strategies

CI/CD Pipelines

Pipelines automate build, test, security scanning, and deployment. Key stages: source → build → unit/integration tests → container/image build → vulnerability scanning → deploy → smoke tests → promote. Artifacts must be immutable and signed.

Infrastructure as Code & GitOps

IaC (Terraform, CloudFormation) codifies infra. GitOps operates on the principle that the desired state is stored in Git and controllers reconcile cluster state (Flux, ArgoCD). Benefits include auditability, rollbacks, and declarative drift detection.

Observability & SRE

Observability comprises metrics, logs, and traces. SRE defines SLOs/SLIs, error budgets, and incident response. Practices include canary analysis, chaos engineering, and automated remediation.

Release Strategies

• Blue/Green: run two environments and switch traffic.
• Canary: gradually shift traffic and monitor metrics.
• Feature flags: toggle functionality without redeploying.

References

1. Fowler et al., CI/CD best practices; HashiCorp/Terraform docs; CNCF / GitOps resources.