ci-cd-pipeline-design

CI/CD Pipeline Design

Automating build, test, and deployment through continuous integration and deployment.

Context

You are designing a CI/CD pipeline. Define stages, dependencies, and success criteria.

Domain Context

• Build: Compile, package; generate artifacts
• Test: Run unit, integration, E2E tests; quality gates
• Deploy: Canary, blue-green, rolling; minimize downtime
• Artifacts: Build outputs; cache for speed
• Secrets: Never in code; use secrets manager

Instructions

1. Identify Stages: Build, test, deploy, monitor
2. Define Triggers: On commit? Pull request? Manual?
3. Parallelize: Run independent jobs in parallel
4. Cache: Cache dependencies, build outputs for speed
5. Gate: Quality gates; don't deploy if tests fail
6. Secrets: Use secrets manager; never in logs
7. Artifacts: Store and reuse build artifacts

Anti-Patterns

• Slow pipelines (>15 min); too long, feedback is slow
• Secrets in code or logs; instant compromise
• No quality gates; broken code gets deployed
• Parallelization ignored; sequential is slow
• No caching; rebuild everything every time

Further Reading

• Google Cloud CI/CD Best Practices
• GitHub Actions documentation
• GitLab CI/CD documentation