Week 3: Automated CI/CD Pipelines for Infrastructure and Application

This week, we’re focusing on building CI/CD pipelines to automate infrastructure and application deployments. Get ready to master:

• Cloud cost optimization with cost estimation tools like InfraCost.
• GitOps workflows for seamless automation.
• Terraform + Ansible integration for infrastructure management and monitoring stack setup.
• Git branching strategies for streamlined CI/CD pipelines.

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💡 What’s Included?

Infrastructure Pipeline

• Use Terraform to provision the cloud infrastructure required for the application.
• Automatically trigger Ansible to set up the monitoring stack (Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, etc.).

Application Pipeline

• Continue working with the three-tier application stack from Week 1.

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🌲 Branch Setup

You’ll work with the following branches:

1. Infrastructure Pipelines:

   • infra_features: Used for writing and testing Terraform changes.
   • infra_main: Main branch for infrastructure.

2. Application Pipelines:

   • integration: Contains the CI pipeline for building and tagging images.
   • deployment: Contains the CD pipeline for deploying the application stack.

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📋 Workflow Details

Infrastructure Pipeline

Branches: infra_features → infra_main

• Push to infra_features:
  • Run terraform validate to check the correctness of configurations.
• PR to infra_main:
  • Trigger terraform plan, output the plan as a comment in the PR, including cost estimation (e.g., using InfraCost).
• Merge to infra_main:
  • Run terraform apply with auto-approval to provision resources.
  • Trigger Ansible to deploy the monitoring stack on the provisioned infrastructure.

Application Pipeline

Branches: integration → deployment

• Push to integration:

  • Build and tag Docker images for the application.
  • Push images to a public Docker Hub repository.
  • Update docker-compose.yml with the new image tags and commit the changes.

• Merge from integration to deployment:

  • Deploy the application stack to the provisioned infrastructure.

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📋 Requirements:

Infrastructure Pipeline

• Use Terraform to automate:
  • Validation, planning (with PR comments), and applying configurations.
  • Include cost estimation in the PR plan output as a required component.
  • Trigger Ansible to deploy the monitoring stack after Terraform apply.

Application Pipeline

• CI Pipeline (Integration Branch):
  • Build and push Docker images to Docker Hub.
  • Update docker-compose.yml with the new image tags and commit the change to the Integration Branch.
• CD Pipeline (Deployment Branch):
  • Deploy the application stack to the cloud infrastructure.

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📋 Acceptance Criteria:

1. Infrastructure Pipeline:

   • Validation, planning (with PR comments, including cost estimation), and application workflows are functional.
   • Ansible playbook is triggered to set up the monitoring stack after Terraform apply.

2. Application Pipeline:

   • CI pipeline builds images, pushes to Docker Hub, updates docker-compose.yml and commits the change.
   • CD pipeline deploys the application stack to the cloud.

3. Workflow Organization:

   • Separate .yml files for each pipeline.
     • terraform-validate.yml
     • terraform-plan.yml
     • terraform-apply.yml
     • ansible-monitoring.yml
     • ci-application.yml
     • cd-application.yml

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📝 Submission Instructions:

Submit your work via the GitHub repository link, including:

1. Link to your github repo containing both the infrastructure and application workflows.
2. Terraform and Ansible configurations.
3. Screenshots of successful execution for all pipelines.
4. A detailed blog post documenting your process, including an architectural diagram.
   Here’s the updated README file with the link hidden behind text:

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⏰ Deadline: Submit on or before Tuesday 11:59 PM. Submit Here.