Chapter 4: DevOps, CI/CD & Monitoring

Designing Systems That Ship Fast, Run Smooth, and Scale With Confidence

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Chapter 3: Cloud & Infrastructure

Now, you’re ready to automate, deploy continuously, and monitor intelligently, core responsibilities of any modern Solution Architect.

Objective

To empower architects with a strong grasp of DevOps principles, CI/CD pipelines, and monitoring tools, enabling full-cycle ownership, from code commit to live deployment and post-release visibility.

The Modern Architect’s Superpower: DevOps

DevOps isn't just a buzzword, it’s a mindset. As a Solution Architect, you’re expected to:

• Bridge the gap between development and operations
• Design automated, reliable pipelines
• Ensure secure, repeatable deployments
• Enable your teams to move fast without breaking things

Let’s walk through how to do that.

CI/CD: Continuous Integration / Continuous Deployment

Dev teams move fast. Your architecture must keep up.

CI/CD Pipelines help you:

• Automatically test every code change
• Package and build artifacts reliably
• Deploy to dev/stage/prod environments with confidence
• Rollback instantly when needed

Popular Tools:

• GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Jenkins, CircleCI, Azure DevOps
• Docker + Kubernetes for container-based deployments
• Helm for packaging Kubernetes apps

You’ll learn how to design a pipeline, not just use one, so you can choose the right tools for each product context.

Docker & Kubernetes Basics

• Docker: Containerize your app to run consistently across environments
• Kubernetes (K8s): Orchestrate containers across clusters for high availability and scalability

As an architect, you won’t be writing Dockerfiles all day, but you must understand how containerization changes deployment, resource allocation, and service discovery.

Infrastructure as Code (IaC) – Beyond Point & Click

IaC lets you codify infrastructure so it’s:

• Version-controlled
• Reusable
• Auditable
• Easy to replicate

You’ve seen Terraform or CloudFormation in Chapter 3, in this chapter, you’ll learn to integrate IaC into your CI/CD pipelines, so infrastructure evolves with code.

Monitoring, Logging & Observability

Architects design systems not only to work, but to be watched, measured, and debugged.

You’ll explore:

• Prometheus & Grafana – metrics & dashboards
• CloudWatch / Azure Monitor / GCP Ops – native observability
• ELK Stack – for log aggregation & search

You’ll learn how to design observable systems, set SLOs/SLIs, and ensure issues are caught before customers feel them.

Lab: Build Your CI/CD Pipeline

Objective: Create a working CI/CD pipeline for a microservice.

• Use GitHub Actions (or GitLab/Jenkins if preferred)
• Containerize the app with Docker
• Push to a Docker registry
• Deploy to a Kubernetes or cloud environment
• Integrate basic health checks and alerting

This hands-on work makes you pipeline-aware, a crucial skill for architects designing for real-time environments.

Quiz: DevOps & IaC Vocabulary

Test your understanding of:

• DevOps terminology
• Pipeline stages
• Docker/K8s concepts
• Infrastructure as Code best practices

This quiz strengthens your architectural fluency in modern delivery systems.

Key Takeaways

• CI/CD is about speed and safety, both are non-negotiable
• Architects must design for automation, not just manual success
• Monitoring and observability are not optional, they are part of design
• DevOps is the bridge between software design and cloud operations

Next Up → Chapter 5: Database & Storage Architecture

Now that your deployment is smooth and observable, it's time to dive into how you store and access data, one of the most crucial parts of scalable system design.

Course is powered by Techvalens

This program is brought to the developer community by Techvalens, a global technology consulting company with over 17 years of experience in building scalable digital solutions for clients across the US, Europe, and India.

We’re the minds behind Evluate AI, AI-powered hiring platform and we’re committed to empowering the next generation of tech leaders.

Follow us on LinkedIn for expert insights, system design tips, and updates on upcoming programs: linkedin.com/company/techvalens