Operations
CI/CD Pipelines
Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery automate the path from code change to production. Well-designed pipelines provide fast feedback, ensure quality, and enable safe, frequent deployments.
- CI â Build and test code on every commit
- CD â Automatically deploy verified changes to production
- Deployment Strategies â Blue-green, canary, rolling updates
CI/CD is the backbone of modern software delivery.
Continuous Integration
The practice of frequently merging code changes into a shared repository, with automated builds and tests.
CI Pipeline Stages
CI Best Practices
| Practice | Description |
|---|---|
| Commit frequently | Small changes = faster feedback |
| Fail fast | Run fastest tests first |
| Parallelize | Run independent stages concurrently |
| Cache dependencies | Reuse node_modules, Docker layers |
| Immutable artifacts | Build once, deploy everywhere |
| Test in isolation | No external dependencies in CI |
Continuous Delivery vs Deployment
| Aspect | Continuous Delivery | Continuous Deployment |
|---|---|---|
| Production deploy | Manual approval | Automatic |
| Frequency | On demand | Every passing commit |
| Risk | Lower (manual gate) | Requires high test confidence |
| Feedback | Slower | Immediate |
Deployment Strategies
Practice Exercises
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Design: Design a CI/CD pipeline for a monorepo with 5 services. Include build caching, parallel testing, and deployment to staging/production.
-
Strategy: A financial service processes $1M/day. Compare blue-green and canary deployment strategies. Which provides lower risk? Which provides faster rollback?
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Optimization: A CI pipeline takes 30 minutes. Identify bottlenecks and optimize it to under 10 minutes. What trade-offs might you make?
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Rollback: During a canary deployment, error rates spike from 0.1% to 5%. Design an automated rollback strategy that detects this and reverts within 60 seconds.
What to Learn Next
-> Containerization Docker, Kubernetes, and pod scheduling.
-> Observability Logging, metrics, tracing, and monitoring.
-> Service Mesh Envoy, Istio, and sidecar proxy patterns.
-> Security Patterns Authentication, authorization, encryption, and mTLS.
-> Cost Optimization Cloud cost management and right-sizing.
-> Event-Driven Architecture Event sourcing, CQRS, and saga patterns.