front matter
Ten years ago, I wrote my first makefile to automate the testing, building, and deployment of a C++ application. Three years later, while working as a consultant, I came across Jenkins and Docker and discovered how to take my automation skills to the next level with CI/CD principles.
The beauty of CI/CD is that it’s simply a rigorous way of recording what you’re already doing. It doesn’t fundamentally change how you do something, but it encourages you to record each step in the development process, enabling you and your team to reproduce the entire workflow later at scale. Over the next few months, I started writing blog posts, doing talks, and contributing to CI/CD-related tools.
However, setting up a CI/CD workflow has always been a very manual process for me. It was done via defining a series of individual jobs for the various pipeline tasks through a graphical interface. Each job was configured via web forms—filling in text boxes, selecting entries from drop-down lists, and so forth. And then the series of jobs were strung together, each triggering the next, into a pipeline. This made the troubleshooting experience a nightmare and reverting to the last known configuration in case of failure a tedious operation.