DevOps and CI/CD for Enterprise: A Practical Guide
How to implement DevOps and CI/CD pipelines in enterprise environments. Covers pipeline design, infrastructure as code, testing automation, deployment strategies, and the cultural changes that make DevOps sustainable.
DevOps Is a Practice, Not a Tool Purchase
Enterprise organisations frequently misunderstand DevOps as a tooling problem — purchase Azure DevOps or GitHub Actions, configure some pipelines, and the benefits materialise. In reality, effective DevOps is a cultural and process shift that uses tooling to automate what should already be well-defined: build processes, testing strategies, deployment procedures, and feedback loops.
The practical foundation is a CI/CD pipeline that automates the path from code commit to production deployment: compile, run unit tests, run integration tests, scan for security vulnerabilities, build deployment artefacts, deploy to staging, run acceptance tests, and promote to production with rollback capability. Each step must be defined, repeatable, and auditable. For enterprises in regulated sectors, this audit trail is not optional — it demonstrates change management governance to regulators and auditors.
Infrastructure as code (Terraform, Bicep) extends these principles to your cloud infrastructure: environments are defined in version-controlled templates, provisioned automatically, and consistent across development, staging, and production. No more "it works on my machine" and no more manually configured production servers that nobody can reproduce.