CI/CD Pipelines

Why pipelines rot

They start clean. Then a flaky test gets a retry, a step gets added “temporarily”, caching breaks silently after a dependency bump, and eighteen months later the build takes half an hour and everyone has learned to ignore it.

The fix is rarely a new CI provider. It is removing work the pipeline should not be doing, and making the remaining work cacheable.

What good looks like

A deploy should be boring. That means the pipeline is fast enough that engineers run it before asking for review, failures point at the actual cause, and shipping to production is a rollout with a canary and an automatic rollback — not a held breath.

We have built this on GitHub Actions, Bitbucket Pipelines and GitLab CI, and the shape stays the same: lint and unit tests on every push, build once, promote the same artefact through environments. Rebuilding per environment is how “it worked in staging” happens.

Working with what you have

We do not migrate you to a new CI platform unless there is a concrete reason. Most teams get the largest improvement from fixing caching, parallelising the slowest stage, and separating build from deploy — all on the tooling they already pay for.