Hosting Ars, part three: CI/CD, or how I learned to stop worrying and love DevOps

Enlarge / DevOps, DevOps, DevOps! (credit: ArtemisDiana / Getty Images)

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!