DevOps Playground: AI News Portal 🚀

Welcome to the DevOps Playground, a complete end-to-end journey from frontend development to automated CI/CD and Infrastructure as Code.

This repository serves as a hands-on tutorial for learning modern DevOps practices.

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🏗️ Project Architecture

• Frontend: Static AI News Portal (HTML5/CSS3)
• Containerization: Docker (Nginx Alpine)
• CI/CD: GitHub Actions (Linting, Build, Security Scan)
• Registry: GitHub Container Registry (GHCR)
• Infrastructure: Kubernetes (Kind) managed by Terraform

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📖 Step-by-Step Tutorial

Step 1: Frontend Development

We built a premium, responsive AI News Portal featuring:

• Glassmorphism UI: Modern, translucent design.
• Dark Mode: Sleek tech aesthetic.
• Dynamic Grid: Company-specific card themes (Google, Microsoft, OpenAI).

Files: Frontend/index.html, Frontend/style.css

Step 2: Containerization (Docker)

To make the application portable, we packaged it using a professional Dockerfile.

• Base Image: nginx:alpine (Tiny and secure).
• Security Patching: We learned to use apk upgrade during build to fix critical vulnerabilities (like CVE-2026-22184).

FROM nginx:alpine
RUN apk update && apk upgrade --no-cache
COPY Frontend /usr/share/nginx/html
EXPOSE 80
CMD ["nginx", "-g", "daemon off;"]

Step 3: CI/CD Pipeline (GitHub Actions)

We automated the entire lifecycle in .github/workflows/main.yml with three key stages:

1. Linting: Using htmlhint to catch HTML syntax errors before they are built.
2. Build & Push:
   • Authentication: Used the built-in ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}.
   • Normalization: Learned that Docker repository names must be lowercase, even if the GitHub repo name has capitals.
3. Security Scan: Using Trivy to scan the final image. We configured it with exit-code: 1 to fail the build if any "Critical" or "High" bugs are found.

Step 4: Infrastructure as Code (Terraform)

Instead of manually creating a Kubernetes cluster, we used Terraform to provision a Kind (Kubernetes in Docker) cluster locally on a Mac.

Why Terraform? It makes your infrastructure repeatable, documented, and version-controlled.

Cluster Config (terraform/main.tf):

• Nodes: 1 Control Plane + 1 Worker Node.
• Port Mapping: Mapped ports 80/443 from your laptop into the cluster nodes for external web access.

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🛠️ Getting Started Locally

1. Build and Run via Docker

docker build -t ai-news-portal .
docker run -p 8080:80 ai-news-portal

2. Spinning up the K8s Infrastructure

cd terraform
terraform init
terraform apply -auto-approve

3. Verify the Cluster

kubectl get nodes
kubectl cluster-info

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🎓 DevOps Lessons Learned

• The "uses" Keyword: Learned that GitHub Actions are modular "Lego blocks" shared by the community.
• Shift-Left Security: We fixed a CRITICAL vulnerability in our pipeline before it ever left the develop branch.
• Idempotency: Terraform ensures that running the same command twice doesn't create two clusters—it only creates what's missing.

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Next Phase: Deploying the AI News Portal inside our new Kind cluster using Kubernetes Manifests (Pods, Services, and Ingress)!