Problem Statement Meeting with Dasher Team

This article examines the DevOps prerequisites of Dasher Technology and demonstrates how GitHub Actions can streamline their CI/CD workflow.

Dasher Technology offers a platform that integrates data, applications, and devices across on-premises environments. Their R&D team is exploring cloud migration and containerization, starting with a Node.js project before extending to Java and Python applications. To spearhead this, they formed a DevOps team led by Alice, whose mission is to design and implement a best-practice CI/CD pipeline on a multi-cloud infrastructure using Docker and Kubernetes.

Current State and Challenges

Alice’s assessment uncovered several critical gaps in the existing Node.js project:

No version control system in place
Developers work in isolation with manual code integration
Slow, error-prone testing and infrequent merges
Manual deployments across development, staging, and production

Warning

Without version control and automation, release risk is high and collaboration suffers.

The image outlines the DevOps requirements for the Task Dash Team, highlighting processes like code integration, collaboration, manual testing, and deployment, alongside automated tasks such as unit testing, code coverage, building, pushing, deploying, and automated IT.

Defining the CI/CD Pipeline

To address these challenges, Alice defined a CI/CD pipeline with these stages:

Adopt GitHub for version control and team collaboration
Automate unit tests and measure code coverage
Build and push Docker images
Deploy the application to Kubernetes
Run automated integration tests

Evaluating CI/CD Tools

The market offers many CI/CD solutions:

Tool	Pros	Cons
Jenkins	Extensible, self-hosted, large plugin library	Manual maintenance, steep learning curve
Travis CI	Easy cloud setup, GitHub integration	Limited concurrency in open-source tier
CircleCI	Fast workflows, SSH debugging	Usage-based pricing
Spinnaker	Kubernetes-centric, advanced deployment models	Complex configuration
Bamboo	Tight Jira integration	License costs

These tools require provisioning servers, installing dependencies, and ongoing management. As projects multiply (Java, Python, AWS, Azure), manual overhead grows:

The image lists traditional CI/CD tools and their challenges, featuring logos for Java, Maven, Python, Azure, AWS CLI, Trivy, and Kubesec.

Jenkins Setup: Manual Steps

If choosing Jenkins, the initial setup includes:

Step	Description
1	Provision VM with CPU, memory, and disk
2	Install Java JDK
3	Configure firewall rules
4	Install Jenkins and required plugins
5	Install Node.js, npm (multiple versions)
6	Install Docker for image builds
7	Install `kubectl`, Helm, and other Kubernetes clients
8	Add CLIs for integration testing and reporting

Note

As the ecosystem expands, you may also need Maven, Python, AWS CLI, Trivy, KubeSec, and other DevSecOps tools.

Why GitHub Actions?

Alice needed a solution that:

Requires minimal setup and no separate infrastructure
Lets the team focus on pipeline development, not server management
Scales automatically across multiple languages and clouds

After evaluation, GitHub Actions emerged as the best fit. In the next sections, we will:

Initialize the GitHub repository for Node.js
Configure workflows for testing and code coverage
Build and publish Docker images
Deploy to Kubernetes using kubectl and Helm
Automate end-to-end integration tests

Links and References

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