A CI/CD (Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery) pipeline is the core component for automating the software delivery lifecycle. Modern CI/CD practices integrate Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tools like Terraform or Ansible. This allows a single, automated pipeline, often triggered by a single action ("one-click"), to first provision a complete sandbox environment (networks, servers, clusters) and then deploy the application code into it. This process ensures consistent, repeatable, and on-demand creation of full environments for development, testing, or staging purposes. The pipeline orchestrates all the necessary steps for both infrastructure and application setup.

B. Service mesh: A service mesh is a dedicated infrastructure layer for managing, securing, and observing service-to-service communication within a microservices architecture. It does not provision the underlying infrastructure or applications.

C. Service bus: A service bus is a middleware pattern for integrating different applications, facilitating communication through a common messaging system. It is not designed for provisioning infrastructure or deploying code.

D. Observability pipeline: An observability pipeline is used to collect, process, and route telemetry data (logs, metrics, traces) from systems to analysis tools. Its function is data management, not environment creation.

1. Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) / Linux Foundation: The CNCF

a Linux Foundation project

defines Continuous Delivery as a practice that includes automated environment provisioning. The "Cloud Native Trail Map" places CI/CD as a fundamental step (Step 4) for automating builds and deployments. The concept of GitOps

which relies on CI/CD

extends this to infrastructure management.

Source: Cloud Native Computing Foundation

"Cloud Native Trail Map

" Step 4: CI/CD. Available at: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/cncf/trailmap/master/CNCFTrailMaplatest.png (Accessed via official CNCF GitHub repository).

2. University Courseware: University courses on DevOps and Cloud Computing detail the role of CI/CD pipelines in orchestrating both infrastructure and application deployment. They describe how pipelines execute IaC scripts to create ephemeral environments before deploying code.

Source: University of California

Berkeley

CS 162: Operating Systems and System Programming

"Lecture 22: Cloud Computing." The lecture notes discuss the automation of resource provisioning and deployment using tools orchestrated by CI/CD systems.

3. Official Vendor Documentation (CNCF Project): Tekton is a cloud-native CI/CD framework and a CNCF project. Its documentation explicitly describes creating Pipelines that consist of Tasks which can execute scripts to provision infrastructure (e.g.

running a Terraform container) and subsequently deploy applications.

Source: Tekton CD Foundation

"Tekton Docs: Concepts

" Section: Pipeline. The documentation explains how a Pipeline specifies a series of Tasks to define a complete build

test

and deploy workflow

which can include infrastructure steps. Available at: https://tekton.dev/docs/pipelines/concepts/