Hey everyone! I'm curious about how software development and deployment worked before the advent of CI/CD pipelines. I get that developers and operations teams used to be pretty siloed. Did developers really have to wait on the operations team to deploy their applications? And is it true that with DevOps culture, developers can now manage deployments themselves while operations focuses more on Site Reliability Engineering? Would love to get your insights on this!
5 Answers
Life before CI/CD was slow and error-prone. I used to spend half a day just installing a Java application in a sandbox by running Linux commands one-by-one. If someone added a config file without telling the team, it would cause massive headaches. Now, with CI/CD, everything's automated and more efficient. You watch pipelines run rather than manually checking every detail.
Back in the day, we were pretty much stuck compiling on a single workstation that had everything set up, and deploying via FTP. I remember yelling "Give me that damn WAR file, Jimmy!" It was chaotic and often involved shell scripts executed on every server to update the code manually. It feels like a lifetime ago, and now that I see teams running automated deployments, it's hard to believe we did it all by hand!
Oh man, I remember those times too! We had a special setup where each developer's machine had everything they needed. Now I'm working on modernizing a company that's still using those outdated processes in 2025!
I recall working with a painfully slow process where we would manually copy files via FTP to production servers, and if anything went wrong, it took days to fix. Nowadays, CI/CD has completely transformed that, enabling rapid deployments. It's pretty clear that the feedback loop has shortened substantially, making it easier to get features out there quickly!
Absolutely! The automation cuts down the waiting and allows for quick fixes, which is a huge win compared to the old days.
In my experience, the division between ops and devs created a lot of tension. We used to use bash scripts to deploy code and sync it across servers, but it was a nightmare. With DevOps blending those roles, deployments are faster, but honestly, sometimes I feel like the buzz around DevOps is overhyped; things still get complicated.
I get what you mean! Sometimes, it sounds faster, but the reality can still feel as hectic as before.
Before CI/CD, deployments felt more like a ritual. We had a central build person who managed every release. If that machine went down, it was chaos! Now, everything is automated with pipelines, which is a godsend. We can deploy multiple times a day instead of waiting weeks.
Totally! We even had to have a 'release' person manually check everything before tagging a version. Now those processes are just a click away! It's like going from a car to a spaceship.