Building a CI/CD Pipeline With Kubernetes: A Development Guide With Deployment Considerations for Practitioners

Editor's Note: The following is an article written for and published in DZone's 2024 Trend Report, Kubernetes in the Enterprise: Once Decade-Defining, Now Forging a Future in the SDLC. In the past, before CI/CD and Kubernetes came along, deploying software to Kubernetes was a real headache. Developers would build stuff on their own machines, then package it and pass it to the operations team to deploy it on production. This approach would frequently lead to delays, miscommunications, and inconsistencies between environments. Operations teams had to set up the deployments themselves, which increased the risk of human errors and configuration issues. When things went wrong, rollbacks were time consuming and disruptive. Also, without automated feedback and central monitoring, it was tough to keep an eye on how builds and deployments were progressing or to identify production issues.