Use case

CICD or Continuous Integration - Continuous Deployment is the modern approach towards automating tasks, typically against code (hence the CD element). CICD in homes in this article refers to people with coding background deploying for personal gains. Examples include smart homes and learning software development.

In my case I use CICD to deploy home infrastructure (Infrastructure as Code - IaC) and small software projects (mintoon.kungfoo.info)

My 'accidental' exposure to CICD

Back in 2014 cloud computing was in its early days towards being a Big Thing. When I joined Amazon as its Technical Program Manager understanding Continuous Integration - Continuous Deployment was implicit. Prior to that my world of production deployment was naively backwards in the form of manual built-from-my-laptop deal; I never knew it was a problem. "It works on my laptop." was real.

CICD at home for the techies

There are multiple CI vendors both open source and commercial. I tried a few locally hosted options. Unfortunately the one I liked best I've since forgotten its name, and Google didn't help with the recall; I fear the worst.

From my stint in Wayfair, I came to learn more about Buildkite as the tool used in the company. This became my current choice for home use for the simple reasons:

1. Free for almost unlimited pipelines.
2. Bring-your-own-agents; install agents in your own server.
3. Does everything I needed even in the free tier.

Takeaway 1: there's little value hosting your own CICD orchestration server

As home servers go, reliability is definitely nowhere near commercial grade. I've had my early installations go bust when hard drives failed and I lost all my pipeline configs.

Buildkite is a neat solution: because one hosts their own agents Buildkite never touches your source code directly. What you get instead is commercial reliability of your pipeline configs. Agents are expendible and easily reinstated.

Takeaway 2: keep pipelines simple

Pipelines can handle complex combinations of steps both in-series and parallel. Your home use probably will only scratch 5% of that (yes less than 10%).

CI is many things; for home use simply leverage the automation bit which is the automatic triggering of actions. Unless there is a clear reason otherwise package all the steps into a single pipeline job. When you don't need to pass artifacts across immutable jobs debugging is easier, and pipelines run faster.

Takeaway 3: there is toil to reduce toil

CICD or automation makes executing repeatable tasks simple and fast. The efficiency comes at a cost: automation count grows invariably. Maintaining 3-5 pipelines is easy, and 10-20 less so. When things break (and they do just like in enterprises, maybe more often) having good documentation and simple designs make it easier to recover.

Bottom line: keep things simple