Windows shops transitioning to devops may not yet know the power of build pipelines when it comes to standing up and maintaing infrastructure. A concept familiar to software developers, the build/release pipeline may sound foreign to those from the operations side of the aisle. But don’t sweat it; InfoWorld is here to help.

A build pipeline consists of many moving parts, the orchestration of which can be hard to grasp. In a nutshell, your build pipeline’s structured set of processes to set your scripts in motion on your servers automatically. You write code — say, some configuration scripts — and commit that code to a source control repository, which kicks off one or more rounds of tests before deploying your code to one or more environments. The key here is automation.

In this article, I break down the process of building a simple continuous deployment pipeline as a way of explaining build pipelines by doing. Follow along to create a build pipeline from scratch, going over each piece of this orchestration of tools. When it comes to devops automation, often the most valuable knowledge comes from focusing on the tactical components.

Note: From now on, I refer to this build/release pipeline as a build pipeline. Although the concept can be referred to a different ways, in this article, it means the process of writing code, committing code to source control, and automatically taking that code to a finished state as a “build pipeline.”