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CI/CD Pipeline for HybridOps.Studio

Executive summary

This showcase demonstrates an opinionated CI/CD pipeline that:

  • Builds Proxmox VM templates and container images using Packer and Docker.
  • Provisions and updates infrastructure using Terraform and Ansible.
  • Deploys workloads to Kubernetes and on-prem services.
  • Captures build and deployment evidence as first-class artefacts.

It is designed to look and feel like a production-ready pipeline that can be extended to real customer environments.

Case study – how this was used in practice

  • Context: Hybrid lab environment combining Proxmox, Kubernetes and public cloud, with a requirement to prove repeatability and auditability.
  • Challenge: Manual, ad-hoc builds and inconsistent environments made it hard to trust test results or reproduce demos.
  • Approach: Introduced a CI/CD pipeline that standardised image builds, infra changes and workload deploys, with evidence collected at each stage.
  • Outcome: Reduced “works on my machine” issues, improved confidence in demos, and created reusable patterns suitable for enterprise teams.

Related decisions (for example):

Demo

Video walkthrough

  • Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CI_CD_PIPELINE_DEMO

In the demo, you will see:

  1. A change pushed to GitHub.
  2. The pipeline building updated images and infrastructure.
  3. Application deployment to the lab environment.
  4. Evidence collection (logs, screenshots, build metadata) for later review.

Screenshots

![Pipeline overview](./diagrams/pipeline-overview.png)
![Evidence dashboard](./screenshots/evidence-dashboard.png)

Architecture

  • High-level diagram:
![High-level architecture](./diagrams/architecture-overview.png)
  • Key components:
  • Source control: GitHub, with protected branches for main/trunk.
  • CI/CD engine: Jenkins and/or GitHub Actions for pipelines.
  • Infra-as-code: Terraform and Ansible to manage Proxmox, cloud and services.
  • Templates: Packer-built images with cloud-init for zero-touch VM provisioning.
  • Observability: Grafana and Prometheus used to visualise build and runtime metrics.

Optional detailed diagrams:

Implementation highlights

  • Pipelines split into stages for lint → build → test → deploy → evidence.
  • All builds run against repeatable IaC definitions, with no manual configuration.
  • Evidence (logs, screenshots, metadata) is stored under a dedicated evidence/ tree.
  • Designed to run in a home lab but aligned with patterns used by enterprise CI/CD platforms.

Assets and source

  • GitHub folder for this showcase:
    https://github.com/hybridops-studio/hybridops-studio/tree/main/showcases/ci-cd-pipeline

  • CI/CD pipelines:

  • control/tools/ci/jenkins/ (Jenkins pipelines)

  • .github/workflows/ (GitHub Actions workflows, if used)

  • Infrastructure as Code:

  • infra/terraform/ – environment provisioning

  • core/ansible/ – configuration management

  • Evidence:

  • ./evidence/ – logs, screenshots and exported dashboards for this showcase.

Academy track (if applicable)

In the Academy, this showcase can be extended into a hands-on lab where learners:

  • Create or modify a pipeline stage.
  • Introduce a controlled failure and use evidence to troubleshoot.
  • Capture a short runbook describing how to recover from a failed deployment.

Role-based lens (optional)

  • Platform Engineer / SRE: demonstrates standardised build/deploy flows and evidence-driven operations.
  • Network / Infrastructure Engineer: shows how infra changes are integrated into CI/CD safely.
  • Engineering Manager / Hiring Manager: highlights ownership of the full delivery lifecycle and a focus on repeatability.

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