Building Enterprise CI/CD Pipelines with Jenkins and Ansible

In over 15 years of DevOps engineering across financial institutions, one of the most impactful things I've done is build CI/CD infrastructure from scratch for large estates.

The Core Stack

For enterprise banking systems, the go-to pipeline stack typically looks like:

• Jenkins for orchestration and pipeline-as-code (Groovy)
• Maven/Gradle for build management
• Nexus/JFrog for artifact management
• Ansible for deployment automation
• SonarQube for code quality gates

Pipeline as Code

Writing Jenkins pipelines in Groovy gives you full version-control of your delivery process...

Ansible Playbooks for Deployment

After Jenkins builds and publishes the artifact to Nexus, Ansible takes over for deployment...

Lessons Learned

• Start simple — a single-stage pipeline beats no pipeline
• Separate your build and deploy stages clearly
• Gate on SonarQube quality before deployment to production
• Use Ansible Tower/AWX for enterprise-scale job management