From shell scripts to pipelines...

When I started managing servers, I mostly used shell scripts. They worked fine for a few tasks -to copy files, restart services, and make simple configuration changes.
But as more applications were added, keeping everything manual started to take too much time. That’s when I began using Jenkins and Azure DevOps to automate the process.

1) Jenkins with SVN and Shell scripts
Application code is stored in SVN. Whenever a job started, Jenkins checked out the latest version of the mentioned repository in SVN and ran the build and deploy steps as configured in the shell script inside the pipeline automatically.

2) Azure DevOps with AKS
Later, I started using Azure DevOps for container-based applications.
These workloads ran on AKS. Pipelines handled the full process - from building container images to deploying updates on AKS.

No more manual logins to servers, clear visibility and logs for each run, easy rollback using previous builds.

All deployments I work on run through pipelines - simple, consistent, and easy to manage.

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Bhavana Kalavala
DevOps & Cloud Engineer