CI/CD Pipeline
Automate build, test and deploy from every commit.
StarterPlatform
A commit triggers a build, runs the test suite, publishes an artifact to a registry, and deploys it -- removing manual, error-prone release steps and giving every change the same repeatable path to production.
When to use it
- Any team shipping software more than a handful of times a year
- You want consistent, auditable builds instead of hand-run release scripts
Trade-offs
- Pipeline itself becomes critical infrastructure that needs its own reliability budget
- Slow test suites turn the pipeline into the bottleneck for shipping
Components used
Source ControlCI/CD PipelineArtifact RegistryDeployment / Release
How it works
- Every commit triggers an automated build that compiles, runs tests and produces a single versioned artifact.
- That same artifact is promoted through environments — no rebuilding per environment, since a rebuild is a different binary.
- Deployment is automated and repeatable, so releasing is a routine event rather than a scheduled ceremony.
Used in the wild
- Effectively every actively developed software project.
- Teams moving from infrequent large releases to frequent small ones.
- Compliance environments needing an auditable trail from commit to production.
Good to know
- Continuous integration originally meant developers merging to trunk at least daily. Many teams that say they 'do CI' run long-lived branches and merge weekly, which is the exact problem CI was invented to prevent.
- Pipeline duration governs behaviour more than any policy. Past roughly ten minutes, developers stop waiting for results and start context-switching, which is where integration problems creep back in.
Related patterns
Model Serving with A/B Testing
Route inference traffic across model versions to compare live performance.
CQRS
Separate models and stores for writes and reads.
Blue-Green Deployment
Run two full production environments, switch traffic between them.
Canary Release
Send a small slice of traffic to the new version before a full rollout.