DevOps for Startups, Setting Up CI/CD Without a Full DevOps Team

Most early-stage US startups don't have a dedicated DevOps engineer. They have developers who also manage infrastructure, which means CI/CD setups that either don't exist, break regularly, or were copy-pasted from a tutorial and nobody fully understands. Here's a production-grade CI/CD setup that a small team can actually own and maintain, without needing a DevOps specialist on staff. The Stack For a US startup with a Node.js/React application deployed to AWS, this setup covers 95% of what you need: Source control: GitHub CI/CD: GitHub Actions Container registry: Amazon ECR Orchestration: Amazon ECS (Fargate) Infrastructure: Terraform Secrets: AWS Secrets Manager All of these have generous free tiers or are inexpensive at startup scale. The GitHub Actions Pipeline Three workflows cover the full lifecycle: # .github/workflows/ci.yml, runs on every PR name : CI on : pull_request : branches : [ main , develop ] jobs : test : runs-on : ubuntu-latest services : postgres : image : postgres:1