One of the most important things to happen in the evolution of development over the past many years is the widespread adoption of continuous integration and continuous deployment, or CI/CD. (Sometimes the “CD” stands for “continuous delivery,” depending on who you’re talking to.)
It’s a concept that jettisons a lot of older ideas about how systems should be managed and instead gives you a way to update code and integrate changes as live rolling deployments while ensuring that the new code is tested and slots in smoothly with stuff that’s already running. A properly architected CI/CD pipeline means you can get code changes into production faster and with fewer errors. But what does that look like in practice?
It looks like Ars Technica, because we’ve adopted a CI/CD workflow to take full advantage of the flexibility afforded us by serverless cloud hosting. Welcome to part three of our four-part series on how we host Ars—here, we’re going to swing away from the “ops” side of “DevOps” and peer more closely at the “dev” part instead. Join us for a look behind the curtain at how Ars uses CI/CD in both our deployed applications and our infrastructure management!