CI/CD: Complete Pipeline Design & Implementation

CI/CD: Complete Pipeline Design & Implementation

Going from commit to production is more than lint-test-build-deploy: it needs a branching strategy (trunk-based or GitFlow), Docker as a consistent build and runtime environment, a staging environment that mirrors production, an explicit rollback strategy for failed deploys, and secrets managed safely (Vault, environment injection) instead of hardcoded.

Starting Points

• Cowell, C., N. Lotz and C. Timberlake (2023). Automating DevOps with GitLab CI/CD Pipelines. Packt.
• Humble, J., & Farley, D. (2010). Continuous Delivery: Reliable Software Releases through Build, Test, and Deployment Automation. Addison-Wesley.
• CI/CD basics

Key Points

• You design a full pipeline from commit to production, covering all stages explicitly.
• You configure automated tests to run as part of the pipeline, blocking deployment on failure.
• You implement separate staging and production deployment stages, not a single direct-to-production step.
• You design a rollback strategy (e.g. redeploy previous image, blue-green, feature flag) for a failed production deployment.
• You manage secrets securely (e.g. Vault, environment variable injection) instead of hardcoding them in the pipeline.
• You containerize the application with Docker as part of the build stage.
• You choose and justify a branching strategy (trunk-based or GitFlow) for a given team size and release cadence.