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From playbooks-virtuoso
Guides designing CI/CD pipelines and choosing deployment strategies (blue-green, canary, rolling, recreate). Covers pipeline stage ordering, test parallelization, caching, secrets management, rollback, and zero-downtime deployments.
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Continuous Integration, Continuous Delivery, and Continuous Deployment form a spectrum of automation practices. Each builds on the previous one, progressively reducing manual intervention between a code change and its availability to users.
Designs CI/CD pipelines with build/test/deploy stages, blue-green/canary/rolling deployments, feature flags, artifact management, and environment promotion strategies. Use for setting up or improving pipelines and workflows.
Outlines CI/CD pipelines with local quality gates, GitHub Actions patterns, branch strategies, and progressive deployments like canary/blue-green. For designing deployment workflows.
Guides CI/CD pipeline design, configuration, and optimization using best practices, DORA metrics, stage references, and platform tips for GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, and Jenkins. Use for pipeline setup, build time improvements, and deployment stages.
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Continuous Integration, Continuous Delivery, and Continuous Deployment form a spectrum of automation practices. Each builds on the previous one, progressively reducing manual intervention between a code change and its availability to users.
| Practice | What It Automates | Gate to Next Stage |
|---|---|---|
| Continuous Integration | Merging, building, and testing code on every commit | Automated tests must pass before merge |
| Continuous Delivery | Packaging and promoting artifacts through environments | Manual approval before production deployment |
| Continuous Deployment | Full path from commit to production without manual steps | Automated quality gates replace human approval |
Continuous Integration is the foundation. Without reliable, fast integration, neither delivery nor deployment is sustainable. Start here and expand outward.
A well-designed pipeline gives developers fast, trustworthy feedback while preventing broken code from reaching users.
| Principle | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Fast feedback | Run the cheapest, fastest checks first - lint and unit tests before integration tests and builds |
| Fail early | Stop the pipeline at the first failure - do not waste time on downstream stages when upstream checks fail |
| Reproducibility | Every pipeline run with the same inputs must produce the same outputs - pin dependencies, use immutable base images |
| Idempotency | Re-running a pipeline stage should be safe and produce the same result |
| Isolation | Each pipeline run operates in a clean environment - no shared state between runs |
| Security by default | Secrets are injected at runtime, never stored in source - scan for vulnerabilities early |
| Strategy | Downtime | Rollback Speed | Infrastructure Cost | Complexity | Best For |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Blue-Green | Zero | Instant (traffic switch) | 2x production | Low | Major releases, risk-averse teams |
| Canary | Zero | Fast (route traffic back) | 1x + small canary slice | Medium | Data-driven teams, high-traffic services |
| Rolling | Zero (if surge configured) | Slow (reverse rollout) | 1x (reuses existing) | Low | Stateless services, frequent small changes |
| Recreate | Yes (brief) | Slow (full redeploy) | 1x | Minimal | Dev/staging environments, stateful apps that cannot run two versions |
| Feature Flags | Zero | Instant (toggle off) | 1x | Medium | Progressive rollout, A/B testing, trunk-based development |
No single strategy fits every situation. Many teams combine approaches - for example, canary releases with feature flags for granular control over who sees new functionality.
A typical promotion path moves artifacts through increasingly production-like environments:
dev -> staging -> production
Key principles:
| Anti-Pattern | Problem | Fix |
|---|---|---|
| Rebuilding artifacts per environment | Different binary in staging vs production | Build once, promote the same artifact |
| Long-running monolithic pipeline | Slow feedback, developers context-switch | Parallelize stages, split into focused pipelines |
| Secrets in source control | Credential leaks, compliance violations | Use a secrets manager, inject at runtime |
| Manual environment setup | Configuration drift, "works on my machine" | Infrastructure as code, containerized builds |
| No rollback plan | Extended outages when deployments fail | Automate rollback, test it regularly |
| Skipping staging | Production-only bugs discovered too late | Always promote through at least one pre-production environment |
| Reference | Contents |
|---|---|
| Pipeline Design | Pipeline stages, parallelization, caching, monorepo patterns, secrets management with multi-format examples |
| Deployment Strategies | Blue-green, canary, rolling deployments, feature flags, zero-downtime migrations, rollback strategies |
| Environment Management | Environment promotion, infrastructure as code, ephemeral environments, artifact versioning, health checks |
| Situation | Recommended Skill |
|---|---|
| Monitoring and observability for deployments | Install knowledge-virtuoso from krzysztofsurdy/code-virtuoso for microservices patterns (circuit breakers, health checks) |
| Security scanning in pipelines | Install knowledge-virtuoso from krzysztofsurdy/code-virtuoso for security practices (OWASP, secure coding) |
| Testing strategy for CI pipelines | Install knowledge-virtuoso from krzysztofsurdy/code-virtuoso for testing pyramid and test design |
| API versioning during deployments | Install knowledge-virtuoso from krzysztofsurdy/code-virtuoso for API design and evolution strategies |