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What tests must pass before staging deployment? Before production? What security checks are required? What is the acceptable pipeline duration? What deployment strategy does each application require? These questions are answered before any pipeline is built.
Pipeline stages, toolchain selection, artifact storage, environment promotion flow, and deployment strategy per application — documented before implementation. Existing test suites reviewed; gaps identified where new tests are needed.
Build, test, and scan stages implemented. Pipeline run against the existing codebase to establish a baseline failure rate before optimizations are applied.
Bring us the constraint. We'll bring the team.
A CI/CD pipeline is not just a build script that runs on a server. It is the engineering team's quality gate, security checkpoint, and deployment vehicle — all in one automated process.
A well-built CI pipeline catches problems before they reach production: unit test failures, integration test failures, static analysis findings, container image vulnerabilities, and dependency license violations. Each failure is a problem that would have been more expensive to find later.
A well-built CD pipeline makes production deployment boring: the same process runs every time, the deployment is observable, and if something goes wrong, the rollback is as automated as the deployment.
The CI stage runs on every commit or pull request. It should complete fast enough that developers don't context-switch while waiting: typically under ten minutes for most applications. It must be deterministic — the same code produces the same result every time.
We build CI pipelines with stages that reflect the quality requirements of the application: dependency install and cache management, compilation or transpilation, unit tests with coverage thresholds, integration tests against ephemeral dependencies, static analysis, container image build, and container vulnerability scanning using tools such as Trivy or Google Cloud's Artifact Registry vulnerability scanning.
The CD stage takes the validated artifact from CI and deploys it through the environment chain: development, staging, and production — with appropriate gates between each environment. For Kubernetes workloads, we implement GitOps with ArgoCD: the deployment state is defined in a Git repository, ArgoCD reconciles the cluster state to match, and deployment history is the Git history.
Deployment strategies we implement: rolling deployments (default for most workloads), blue-green (for zero-downtime cutover with instant rollback), and canary (for progressive traffic shifting to validate a new version before full rollout).
We implement CI/CD on the toolchain appropriate for the organization's context: GitHub Actions for teams using GitHub (the most flexible and widely supported), Cloud Build for GCP-native workflows with tight GCP service integration, or Tekton for teams that need a Kubernetes-native pipeline platform. For Kubernetes deployment, ArgoCD is our default GitOps tool.
ArgoCD or direct deployment pipeline configured. Environment promotion flow implemented with the agreed gates. Deployment strategy implemented and validated with a test rollout and rollback.
Pipeline health monitoring (success rate, duration trends, failure classification). Documentation of the pipeline architecture and the process for onboarding new services to it. Engineering team trained on operating the pipelines.