As companies moved to hybrid remote work models, deploy their sites on cloud-native architectures, deliver softwares in new and improved fashion, DevOps practices are more crucial than ever. To dive deeper into the emerging trends around CI/CD, Opsera hosted a CrowdChat with industry experts to highlight some additional thoughts from the CI/CD Trends report that DZone had recently published. The goal was to get members of the IT community together to chat about the findings and to discuss common pain points and misconceptions surrounding CI/CD.

The lively conversation that ensued was thanks in large part to the excellent group of hosts who graciously agreed to moderate the chat including: Marc Hornbeek, Garima Bajpai, Mark Peters, Niladri Choudhuri, Siddharth Pareek, Daniel Stori, Blake Ethridge and of course, several of the team members within Opsera who participated as well! 

The CrowdChat featured a number of thought-provoking questions around the state of CI/CD. For instance, one of our favorites was “How would you describe CI/CD to a 10 year old?” Marc Hornbeek gave a very interesting analogy to breakdown CI/CD to its simplest form:

CI/CD is like a choo-choo train for computer software. It is a system that involves all the train engineers, conductors, train cars, tracks and controls working well together, to ensure the passengers, which are software-change, get to their destination safe and quick.
- Marc Hornbeek

Another great question that sparked some very interesting discussions was “What is one misconception about CI/CD?” A common theme that emerged from this topic was that DevOps is ALL about CI/CD. DevOps is a much more complex theory that stretches beyond just the realm of the CI/CD world. DevOps is all about culture and collaboration and CI/CD is just one piece of that puzzle. In addition there were conversations about how CI/CD should be applied to all types of software applications. However, CI/CD toolchains and pipelines require an investment to set up and maintain. It is a business decision whether to use CI/CD for a specific application. Garima Bajpai posted an interesting opinion in response to this question:

CI/CD is not your strategy it is means to strategy execution
- Garima Bajpai

In addition to the CrowdChat itself, the hosts of the event were also having their own conversation in a zoom back channel about all things CI/CD and the responses the community was giving to these questions! The conversation was enlightening and provided an even deeper dive into the trends, questions and responses happening in tandem with the CrowdChat. Lucky for you, we decided to record that conversation and can’t wait to give you a deeper glimpse into the minds of these CI/CD experts and a behind the scenes recap of this awesome event, so stay tuned! 

We had a great time hosting this CrowdChat and appreciate all of the engagement and conversations we had along the way with the whole community! We are already looking forward to the next edition of this CrowdChat and can’t wait for you to be a part of it! You can read the entire CrowdChat thread below and see what all of these experts had to say!