When a company’s efficiency depends on software, DevOps support becomes necessary in streamlining processes, enhancing collaboration, and speeding up the delivery of products. Ultimately, while these projects have a highly efficient DevOps model, creating them involves a lot of coding, which can be challenging for some developers. 

However, the emergence of low-code and no-code development tools has made it feasible to build robust DevOps pipelines with little or no coding experience. In this guide, we will give you step-by-step instructions on how to build a DevOps pipeline using low-code and no-code development tools and fit it into your already established workflows.

Step 1: What is DevOps and Low-Code/No-Code Solutions

Before embarking on the details, it would be appropriate to articulate what other factors solutions included in the known features of no-code and low-code development tools can contribute to within a DevOps pipeline.

Low-code tools offer a software development environment designed to increase the productivity of application developers by permitting them to develop applications with a low volume of manual programming.

No-code tools are even more straightforward than that, which allows people with no technical background to develop working applications using predefined templates and processes.

When it comes to managing a ci and cd pipeline, these tools let you easily create integration, testing, deployment, or even monitoring into its steady flow in a daily effort, which would otherwise involve great painstaking efforts in designing and coordinating a conventional pipeline.

Step 2: Choosing the Suitable Tool for Your Pipeline

When developing a DevOps pipeline, plenty of tools are available that do not need coding or may support low coding. Here are some platforms widely used:

• Jenkins X: It is a variant that is ideally suited for Cloud-native Kubernetes. It simplified the CI-CD process with minimal setups.
• GitHub Actions: You can automate workflows from your Git repository with just a bit of scripting.
• Zapier and Integromat: They provide seamless cross-platform integration for various tools to facilitate the work switches and network to DevOps without coding.

Pick the most suited platform for your team based on the degree of your project, the thermal universe of ready technologies, and the requirements for extra specifications for DevOps.

Step 3: Establishing the Workflow of the DevOps Pipeline

A DevOps pipeline usually has several steps to automate allocating the developed code to various environments until production. Including the information below in your CI and CD pipeline is essential.

• Source Control: The common area where the code is stored is usually defined as git repositories.
• Continuous Integration: In this phase, every code added to the repository is built, and tests are performed.
• Continuous Deployment: In this phase, all the steps of the release process are scripted, and all the changes are made live after the specified positive test cases have been executed.
• Monitoring and Feedback: This is where the post-deployment system operability and feedback are captured for the sake of order.

Step 4: Building the Pipeline with Low-Code/No-Code Tools

Step 4.1: Automating Source Control Integration

The most basic and first step involves the establishment of the repository on a low-code and no-code development platform. A host of services offers integration with GitHub, GitLab or rather Bitbucket in a few clicks:

• GitHub Actions can efficiently execute CI workflows through their built-in trigger, which attaches them to every push or pull request.
• Similarly, whenever a commit is made to the repository, actions can be triggered via Zapier. Integration with Slack or Jira can help in sending notifications and alerts automatically.

Step 4.2: Setting Up Continuous Integration (CI)

As soon as the connection to the repository is established, it becomes possible to create a ci and cd pipeline for continuous coordination:

• Jenkins X, CircleCI (with the low-code configuration being supported) structures other units that assist in the automation of the building, validation and testing of the code.
• Explore the potentiality of these tools in running unit tests, security tests, and even linting after each commit without any manual effort.
• Many no-code platforms provide a drag-and-drop interface for defining such tests, thus enabling anyone who is not technically inclined to build automated test workflows with ease.

Step 4.3: Improving Deployment Process With Continuous Deployment (CD)

Once speaking in circles, one could deploy the code that has accomplished and passed all tests conducted in the Continuous Integration stage to production. This text is barrier-free as it explains complex technical concepts in simple terms. Since so-called low-code tools such as GitHub Actions or Integromat allow to deploy with the following methods:

• For example, make an automated deployment to your cloud platform (AWS, Google Cloud or Azure).
• You can host your application from these platforms with templates requiring little setup.
• You can also hook up with containers like Kubernetes and use low-code dependant DevOps to manage Container, which caps the entire DevOps Process.

Step 4.4: Observing and Gathering Insights

Performing deployment is not the end of the application lifecycle; the deployed application needs an expert review of its behavior on the target platform. From the details provided, it seems that one can automate the feedback loop and monitoring by using non-code solutions as follows:

• Using monitoring services like Datadog, New Relic or CloudWatch, you can add integrations with Zapier and create alerts for performance issues and security breaches.
• Feedback collection is quite exhaustive for automation, so you can embed Trello or Jira into the pipeline to collect feedback. For instance, a new card can be created when an issue is detected, or a new ticket is generated.

Step 5: Connecting with Current Workflows

One of the most significant benefits of low-code and no-code development attitudes is their harmonizing with already available work processes. This is how you can do that:

• Communication Integration: Employ units of no-code pipeline automation to integrate your pipeline processes with communication tools such as Slack or Microsoft Teams. So your employees will be informed of failing builds, deployment and other necessary actions.
• Issue Tracking: Integrate your pipeline into an issue management tool such as Jira or Asana to track progress on issues. We understand that it will often evolve, and thanks to the way the code is altered, new tasks will be generated and updated in your project management software.
• Version Control: Confirmation of the full versioning control integration into your ci and cd pipeline is essential. GitHub Actions and related tools allow tight coupling whereby tests can be performed, deployments can be done, and rollbacks can be effected from the repository whenever needed.

Step 6: Adding More Resources to Your Pipeline

Your project will likely expand with time, so resizing the DevOps pipeline is unavoidable. Luckily, however, most low-code and no-code development tools are engineered to cater to scalability in a pretty easy manner:

• Cloud-native options like Jenkins X and CircleCI give you the capability of dynamically scaling your infrastructure based on the workload you have at present.
• Also, you can use Kubernetes clusters where the required workloads are spread over different machines, and there is no more configuration to be done.
• No-code tools also feature scalability, allowing you to have additional services or make a complex process more accessible.

Conclusion

Employing low-code and no-code development models in building a DevOps pipeline can be very helpful for teams that want efficient processes and low dependency on hardcore programming capabilities. By using this guide, creating a highly optimized operational workflow that includes a ci and cd process that can support continuous deployment and, in due course, be extended in tandem with project development is possible. 

In the end, understanding how to set up tools and software for efficient software development enables improved speed of delivery, better collaboration, good quality, and security in the pipeline. Convenience in software delivery can be achieved by leveraging low and no code development to enable DevOps capabilities.