CI/CD Without the Cult Language
What It Actually Is (And Why Everyone Explains It Badly)
Somewhere in every IT org is a meeting where someone confidently says:
“Yeah, we do CI/CD.”
No one asks follow-up questions.
No one wants to know how.
And everyone quietly hopes the pipeline doesn’t break before lunch.
CI/CD has become one of those acronyms—like “cloud-native” or “zero trust”—that people claim because not claiming it feels career-limiting.
The problem?
Most people don’t actually know what it means.
They just know the tools they were handed and the scars they earned.
Let’s fix that.
The One-Sentence Definitions (That No One Uses)
Here’s CI/CD without the buzzwords:
Continuous Integration (CI)
Automatically checking that your changes don’t suck before they get merged.
Continuous Delivery (CD)
Automatically preparing changes so they’re always deployable—even if you choose not to deploy them yet.
That’s it.
No unicorns. No DevOps priesthood. No “digital transformation journey.”
CI finds problems early.
CD removes panic from release day.
Neither one magically makes you “move fast.”
What CI/CD Is Not
Let’s clear the fog:
It’s not a tool
It’s not Jenkins
It’s not GitHub Actions
It’s not auto-deploying to prod
It’s not something you buy from a vendor
If you can’t describe your CI/CD process without naming a product, you don’t have CI/CD—you have software.
And software without a process is just an outage waiting to happen.
Why CI/CD Feels Fake in Most Organizations
CI/CD has a reputation problem because this is how it usually goes:
The pipeline worked in the demo
Tests check syntax, not reality
Everything is green… right up until prod explodes
Infra gets involved after the failure
So the pipeline becomes:
A checkbox for leadership
A dashboard that lies
A thing you bypass “just this once”
At that point, it’s not automation—it’s theater.
The Sysadmin Reframe (This Is the Important Part)
If CI/CD sounds like a dev-only thing, that’s because it’s usually explained badly.
Here’s the infrastructure translation:
CI for infra means:
Linting configs
Validating syntax
Catching bad changes before they touch real devices
CD for infra means:
Controlled, repeatable releases
Predictable rollbacks
Fewer late-night SSH heroics
Or said another way:
CI/CD is just change management that doesn’t hate you back.
It doesn’t remove humans.
It removes surprises.
Why This Matters (Even If You’re Not “Doing DevOps”)
You don’t need microservices.
You don’t need containers.
You don’t need a startup hoodie.
If you manage:
Firewalls
Switches
Servers
Cloud configs
Infrastructure-as-code
…you’re already living in CI/CD territory—whether you call it that or not.
The difference is whether your process catches mistakes early or lets them reach production at full speed.
What’s Coming Next
This is the kickoff. Not the deep dive.
In the next issue, we’ll zoom in on the most misunderstood part of the whole thing:
Continuous Integration — why everyone skips it, and why that makes deployments feel cursed.
Paid readers will get real-world examples and practical breakdowns.
Free readers will still get the clarity (and the sarcasm).
Either way, no cult robes required.
— JJ – Chief Packet Pusher