A well-designed CI/CD pipeline gives developers fast feedback, catches bugs early, and deploys reliably. Core principles: fail fast (run cheapest checks first), parallelise independent stages, build once and promote artifacts through environments, require approval gates before production. The test pyramid guides stage ordering: unit tests (fast, many) → integration tests (medium) → e2e tests (slow, few). Pipeline design directly impacts developer velocity and mean time to recovery.
Build once, promote the same image through environments.
Lint fails 15% of PRs at near-zero cost. Put it first. E2E tests rarely fail on a PR that passed unit+integration — run them last. Optimize for the average case.
Building in CI and rebuilding in the deploy job risks deploying different code than what was tested. Build once, tag with commit SHA, push to registry, deploy that exact tag.
Security scans (SAST, DAST, SCA) can take 5-10 minutes. Run them in parallel with integration tests. Block deployment on high/critical findings, warn on medium.
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