CI/CD Pipeline Architecture

Overview

Design CI/CD pipelines with deployment verification, rollback capabilities, and zero-downtime strategies from day one.

Core principle: "Deploy to production" is not a single step - it's a sequence of gates, health checks, gradual rollouts, and automated rollback triggers. Skipping these "for speed" causes production incidents.

When to Use

Use this skill when:

• Setting up new CI/CD pipelines (before writing workflow files)
• Experiencing deployment failures in production
• CI feedback loops are too slow (tests taking too long)
• No confidence in deployments (fear of breaking production)
• Manual rollbacks required after bad deploys
• Downtime during deployments is acceptable (it shouldn't be)
• Migrations cause production issues