CI/CD Pipeline Design

Architects end-to-end continuous integration and continuous delivery pipelines tailored to your team size, tech stack, and deployment requirements. Covers branching strategy, build stages, test automation layers, artifact management, environment promotion, deployment strategies (blue-green, canary, rolling), monitoring integration, and rollback procedures.

Usage

Describe your application stack, team workflow, deployment targets, and any compliance requirements (SOC2, HIPAA, etc.). Specify your preferred CI/CD platform (GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Jenkins, CircleCI) or ask for a platform-agnostic design. The skill provides a complete pipeline architecture with stage definitions and configuration examples.

Examples

• "Design a CI/CD pipeline for a Next.js monorepo deploying to Vercel with preview deployments per PR"
• "Create a pipeline architecture for a microservices app deploying to EKS with canary releases"
• "Build a CI/CD design for a mobile app with separate build lanes for iOS and Android"
• "Design a pipeline with manual approval gates for staging-to-production promotion in a regulated environment"

Guidelines

• Implement the testing pyramid: many unit tests, fewer integration tests, minimal E2E tests
• Fail fast by running lint and unit tests before expensive build and integration stages
• Use branch protection rules requiring CI checks to pass before merge
• Cache dependencies and build artifacts between pipeline stages to reduce execution time
• Implement environment promotion (dev → staging → production) with identical build artifacts
• Include security scanning (SAST, dependency audit, container scanning) as pipeline stages
• Design rollback procedures that can execute in under 5 minutes for production incidents
• Monitor pipeline metrics: build time, success rate, deployment frequency, lead time for changes