cd-pipeline

CD Pipeline

Release automation that minimises blast radius. The goal is confidence — deploy frequently, detect problems early, roll back in under 5 minutes.

When to use

• Designing a deployment strategy for a new service (blue-green, canary, rolling)
• Implementing environment promotion gates (dev → staging → prod)
• Writing rollback automation triggered by SLO violations
• Setting up progressive delivery with feature flags or traffic splitting
• Reviewing a CD pipeline for missing safety gates
• Automating release notes and change management records

When NOT to use

• Build and test automation → use ci-pipeline
• IaC provisioning of the deployment infrastructure → use iac
• SLO definition for the release gate → use slo-architect

Core principle: every deployment must be reversible in < 5 minutes

Deployment strategy selection:

Strategy	Downtime	Rollback speed	Resource cost	Best for
Rolling update	None	Slow (re-deploy previous)	Low	Stateless services
Blue-green	None	Instant (DNS/LB flip)	2× compute	Services with hard rollback SLO
Canary	None	Fast (shift traffic back)	Low	High-traffic, risk-sensitive
Recreate	Brief	N/A	Low	Batch jobs, non-critical

Release gates (never skip these)

1. CI pipeline green on the exact artifact SHA being deployed
2. Smoke test passes in staging
3. Error budget not already exhausted (SLO check)
4. On-call engineer acknowledges deployment during business hours

Scripts

# Evaluate which deployment strategy fits a service's risk profile
python scripts/strategy_evaluator.py --service payments-api --slo-target 99.9 --traffic-rps 1200

# Check rollback readiness (previous artifact available, runbook exists, rollback tested)
python scripts/rollback_checker.py --service payments-api --env prod

# Detect config drift between environments
python scripts/env_drift_detector.py --source staging --target prod

References

• Deployment Strategies — blue-green, canary, rolling, recreate decision tree
• Environment Management — promotion gates, config management, secrets per env
• Progressive Delivery — feature flags, traffic shifting, Argo Rollouts
• Release Gates — SLO checks, smoke tests, change freeze windows