Writing code on your own computer is only half the job; it has to run reliably somewhere users can reach it. Most teams maintain separate environments: development (where you build and test locally), staging (a near-identical copy used for final checks before release), and production (the live version real users depend on). A CI/CD (Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment) pipeline automates the steps between finishing code and it going live: running tests automatically on every change, and deploying the code to production once those tests pass, removing manual, error-prone release steps. You will practice deploying a basic project to a modern cloud platform and understand environment variables, a way of keeping sensitive configuration like API keys out of the code itself.