Let's start with a question. What is a serverless development pipeline and does it differ from traditional patterns? The answer is yes and no, which means we should probably explore patterns to understand their context.

The idea of pipeline patterns comes from the need to perform source, build, test, and deployment tasks as part of the development life cycle of a piece of software. We use a tool called Jenkins, which introduced the idea of creating jobs for each of these stages. From there, we could chain jobs together to create configurable automated pipelines. Jenkins is still widely used today and has strong community support. Thousands of plugins have been developed by the community and support a range of different tasks. Configuration and maintenance are driven through a browser-based user interface, so there is a learning curve when it comes to adopting good configuration practices.

With the move toward configuration and infrastructure being declared as code, we are seeing the same thing happen to pipeline declarations. With the tools and technologies we have available today, it is now easier to define our pipelines (often in a YAML file) alongside the application code and another service can take care of creating, implementing, running, and maintaining the pipeline orchestration.

In this section, we will learn how we can leverage good practices in our DevOps pipeline strategies before we move on to technology options.