In this thesis, we present a collection of work to understand how thermodynamic processes affect the evolution of structures over time, in particular galaxies and their surrounding regions known as the circumgalactic medium (CGM). The main focus is to model thermal and kinetic Sunyaev-Zeldovich (tSZ and kSZ, respectively) radial profiles of the CGM, which in turn yield information of the gas pressure and density profiles of the systems. We use hydrodynamical cosmological simulations to select for halos matching properties of an example observed galaxy sample, and derive methods to compute density and pressure profiles, which can then be forward modeled into SZ profiles. We explore the impact of certain choices on the resulting profiles when modeling the simulated galaxy sample, such as mass range and colors of the galaxies. We calculate these profiles from a variety of simulations varying the underlying physical processes, and forecast the constraining power we would be able to achieve on the underlying physics given an observed SZ profile. In addition to analyzing differences in the simulated profiles, we can compare the forward-modeled SZ profiles to the actual SZ observations of the galaxy sample for which we have modeled our simulated samples. We find that the profiles computed from the simulations considered in this study under-predict the specific SZ data to which we compare. Therefore, we perform a detailed analysis of the forward modeling pipeline for SZ profiles through changing several of the computations to see whether the results are robust. We find that, while a few of the computations along the forward modeling pipeline needed to be improved, the differences between the simulations and observations remain. Finally, we provide a description for the implementation of our forward modeling pipeline into a (soon-to-be) public repository of likelihoods for upcoming Simons Observatory data. We include a test case of this updated computation package on recent unpublished SZ data, showing that this pipeline is ready for use on upcoming observations.