A beginner’s guide to building DevOps pipelines with open source tools

DevOps has become the default answer to fixing software development processes that are slow, siloed, or otherwise dysfunctional. But that doesn’t mean very much when you’re new to DevOps and aren’t sure where to begin. This article explores what a DevOps pipeline is and offers a five-step process to create one. While this tutorial is not comprehensive, it should give you a foundation to start on and expand later. But first, a story.

My DevOps journey

I used to work for the cloud team at Citi Group, developing an Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) web application to manage Citi’s cloud infrastructure, but I was always interested in figuring out ways to make the development pipeline more efficient and bring positive cultural change to the development team. I found my answer in a book recommended by Greg Lavender, who was the CTO of Citi’s cloud architecture and infrastructure engineering, called The Phoenix Project. The book reads like a novel while it explains DevOps principles.

A table at the back of the book shows how often different companies deploy to the release environment: