Top CI/CD resources to set you up for success

Continuous integration and continuous deployment were key topics in 2019 as organizations look to achieve seamless, flexible, and scalable deployments.

This has been a fantastic year for continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) and the world of DevOps. Opensource.com authors shared how they're moving toward agile and scrum as they focus on seamless, flexible, and scalable deployments. Here are some of the big themes in the CI/CD articles we published this year.

Learning and improving your CI/CD skills

Some of our favorite articles focus on hands-on CI/CD experience and cover a lot of ground as they do. The place to start is always with Jenkins pipelines, and Bryant Son's Building CI/CD pipelines with Jenkins will give you enough experience to get started building your first pipelines. Daniel Oh's Automate user acceptance testing with your DevOps pipeline provides great information on acceptance testing, including various CI/CD applications you can use for testing in its own right. And my article on Security scanning your DevOps pipeline is a very short, to the point tutorial on how to set up security in a pipeline using the Jenkins platform.

Delivery workflow

While learning how to use and improve your skills with CI/CD, the workflow matters, especially when it comes to pipelines, as Jithin Emmanuel shares in Screwdriver: A scalable build platform for continuous delivery. Emily Burns explains having the flexibility to build exactly what you need with your CI/CD workflow in Why Spinnaker matters to CI/CD. And Willy-Peter Schaub extols the idea of creating a unified pipeline for everything to build consistently in One CI/CD pipeline per product to rule them all. These articles will give you a good sense of what happens after you onboard team members to the workflow process.

How CI/CD affects organizations

2019 was also the year of recognizing CI/CD's business impact and how it affects day-to-day operations. Agnieszka Gancarczyk shares the results of Red Hat's Small Scale Scrum vs. Large Scale Scrum survey, including respondents' differing opinions on scrums, the agile movement, and the impact on teams. Will Kelly covers How continuous deployment impacts the entire organization, including the importance of open communication, and Daniel Oh emphasizes the importance of metrics and observability in 3 types of metric dashboards for DevOps teams. Last, but far from least, Ann Marie Fred's great article Don't test in production? Test in production! details why it's important for you to test in production—before your customers do.

We are thankful to the many contributing authors who shared their insights with Opensource.com readers in 2019, and I look forward to learning more from them about the evolution of CI/CD in 2020.