Notes / tag / ci-cd

#ci-cd

137 notes across 2 topics

What is GitOps

A declarative delivery model where Git is the single source of truth for desired system state, and an in-cluster controller continuously reconciles live state to match it — the operating model behind ArgoCD and FluxCD.

tech gitops kubernetes ci-cd cncf
Jul 9, 2026

1 — The Evolution of Software Delivery

Traces the path from manual, ticket-driven releases through DevOps automation to platform-engineered software factories that treat delivery itself as a product.

ci-cd introduction book

2 — What Is a CI/CD Platform?

Defines a CI/CD platform as a product with its own responsibilities, consumers, shared services, and capability surface, rather than a single pipeline tool.

ci-cd introduction book

3 — CI/CD Platform Architecture

Lays out the seven-layer reference architecture — developer, source control, build, artifact, deployment, runtime, and feedback — that the rest of the book is organized around.

ci-cd introduction book

4 — Platform Maturity Model

Defines a five-stage maturity curve from manual delivery to autonomous delivery, used throughout the book to benchmark platform capability.

ci-cd introduction book

1 — Git as the Platform Backbone

Covers how branching strategy, trunk-based development vs GitFlow, and monorepo vs polyrepo choices shape everything a CI/CD platform has to support.

ci-cd foundations book

2 — Pipeline Architecture

Compares pipeline-as-code, declarative pipeline models, event-driven triggering, and workflow orchestration as the architectural building blocks of any pipeline system.

ci-cd foundations book

3 — Pipeline Design Principles

Establishes idempotency, reusability, modularity, parameterization, and composability as the design principles that separate a maintainable pipeline from a fragile one.

ci-cd foundations book

4 — Pipeline Lifecycle

Walks the full pipeline lifecycle — trigger, build, test, package, deploy, verify, promote, rollback — as the canonical stage model referenced throughout the book.

ci-cd foundations book

5 — GitHub Actions: CI/CD Design Patterns

Covers build-once-deploy-many, immutable artifacts, promotion pipelines, GitOps, and trunk-based development as durable CI/CD design patterns.

ci-cd foundations book

1 — Build Platform Architecture

Describes the architecture of a build platform — distributed builds, build farms, build agents, and the hosted-vs-self-hosted runner trade-off.

ci-cd build book

2 — Build Optimization

Covers incremental builds, parallelization, dependency caching, and remote build caches as the levers for cutting build time at scale.

ci-cd build book

3 — Build Standardization

Explains how shared build templates, org-wide standards, build libraries, and reusable pipeline components keep hundreds of teams' builds consistent.

ci-cd build book

4 — Build Reliability

Covers retry strategies, build health signals, diagnostics, and observability practices that keep a build platform trustworthy at scale.

ci-cd build book

5 — GitHub Actions: Cache Optimization

Covers dependency caching, cache key and restore-key design, diagnosing cache misses, and the performance tradeoffs of aggressive caching.

ci-cd build book

6 — GitHub Actions: Pipeline Performance

Covers parallelism, dependency-graph optimization, cache strategy, and artifact-size optimization for faster pipelines.

ci-cd build book

1 — CI Architecture

Covers event-driven CI triggering, pipeline orchestration, fan-in/fan-out pipeline shapes, and matrix builds as the architectural patterns behind a CI platform.

ci-cd ci book

2 — Automated Testing Platform

Surveys the automated test pyramid a CI platform must support — unit, integration, contract, end-to-end, and performance tests — and how each shapes pipeline design.

ci-cd ci book

3 — Code Quality Platform

Covers static analysis, code coverage, linting, and dependency analysis as the code-quality gates a CI platform enforces before code merges.

ci-cd ci book

4 — Security in CI

Covers secret detection, SAST, dependency scanning, container scanning, and license compliance as the security gates built into the CI stage.

ci-cd ci book

5 — GitHub Actions: Performance Engineering

Covers k6-based load testing, benchmarking, and automated performance regression detection inside a pipeline.

ci-cd ci book

1 — Artifact Management

Covers artifact repositories, OCI registries, language package repositories, and versioning schemes as the foundation of an artifact platform.

ci-cd artifacts book

2 — Artifact Lifecycle

Walks an artifact's lifecycle from publishing through promotion, retention policy, and cleanup, and why each stage needs explicit platform support.

ci-cd artifacts book

3 — Software Supply Chain

Covers build provenance, SBOMs, artifact signing, and verification as the software-supply-chain controls layered on top of artifact storage — see kubernetes/08-supply-chain-security for the Sigstore/cosign/SLSA implementation detail.

ci-cd artifacts book

4 — Dependency Management

Covers internal library management, third-party dependency handling, repository mirroring, and dependency governance policy at platform scale.

ci-cd artifacts book

5 — GitHub Actions: Artifacts

Covers uploading and downloading build artifacts, retention policy tuning, handling large files, and publishing test/report artifacts from a workflow run.

ci-cd artifacts book

1 — Deployment Architecture

Contrasts push- and pull-based deployment, introduces GitOps and deployment controllers, and covers environment promotion — see tech/gitops.md, tech/argocd.md, and tech/fluxcd.md for the tool-level mechanics.

ci-cd cd book

2 — Environment Management

Covers how a delivery platform manages the development, testing, staging, production, and ephemeral-environment tiers as first-class platform resources.

ci-cd cd book

3 — Deployment Strategies

Compares rolling updates, blue-green, canary, shadow deployments, and A/B testing as the deployment strategies a delivery platform must offer as reusable primitives.

ci-cd cd book

4 — Progressive Delivery

Covers feature flags, automated verification, traffic shifting, and progressive rollouts as the mechanics behind safely decoupling deploy from release.

ci-cd cd book

1 — Why GitHub Actions

Explains what event-driven automation on the GitHub ecosystem buys you, compares GitHub Actions against Jenkins, Azure DevOps, GitLab CI, CircleCI, Buildkite, and Tekton, and calls out when NOT to reach for GitHub Actions at all.

ci-cd github-actions book

10 — Reusable Workflows

Covers workflow_call, typed inputs/outputs/secrets, and versioning and best-practice conventions for DRY, org-shared CI, grounded in this repo's own reusable Docker, .NET, Python, and Terraform workflows.

ci-cd github-actions book

11 — Composite Actions

Compares composite actions, JavaScript actions, and Docker actions as ways to package and publish reusable steps to the Marketplace.

ci-cd github-actions book

12 — Workflow Templates

Covers organization and enterprise workflow templates as a governance and standardization mechanism across many repositories.

ci-cd github-actions book

13 — GitHub-Hosted Runners

Covers GitHub-hosted runner images, resource limits, performance characteristics, and billing model.

ci-cd github-actions book

14 — Self-Hosted Runners

Covers self-hosted runner installation, labels, runner groups, scaling, autoscaling, security hardening, and maintenance for enterprise fleets.

ci-cd github-actions book

15 — Actions Runner Controller (ARC)

Covers running Actions Runner Controller on Kubernetes — runner scale sets, autoscaling, ephemeral runners, and enterprise fleet architecture.

ci-cd github-actions book

16 — Monorepo Pipelines

Covers path filters, selective builds, dependency graphs, and incremental builds for CI in a monorepo.

ci-cd github-actions book

17 — Large-Scale Repository Automation

Covers automating CI/CD across many repositories, org-wide shared workflows, and governance at scale.

ci-cd github-actions book

18 — Azure

Covers Azure Login, ARM templates, AKS, Container Apps, Functions, Key Vault, Bicep, and Terraform deployment from a workflow.

ci-cd github-actions book

19 — AWS

Covers IAM, OIDC federation, ECS, Lambda, and EKS deployment from a workflow.

ci-cd github-actions book

2 — GitHub Actions Architecture

Walks the full GitHub Actions object model — repositories, events, workflows, jobs, steps, runners, the Marketplace, artifacts, cache, packages, and environments — and how they compose.

ci-cd github-actions book

20 — Google Cloud

Covers GKE, Cloud Run, and Workload Identity Federation deployment from a workflow.

ci-cd github-actions book

21 — Containers

Covers building with Docker and Buildx, multi-stage and multi-arch builds, and image signing in CI.

ci-cd github-actions book

22 — Kubernetes

Covers deploying to Kubernetes from a workflow with kubectl, Helm, and Kustomize, versus triggering GitOps reconciliation via ArgoCD or FluxCD.

ci-cd github-actions book

3 — YAML Essentials

Covers the YAML syntax, expressions, variables, anchors, and multiline string forms that every GitHub Actions workflow file depends on.

ci-cd github-actions book

4 — Workflow Syntax

Documents the top-level workflow keys — name, on, jobs, steps, uses, run, env, defaults, permissions, and concurrency — and how they interact.

ci-cd github-actions book

5 — Events & Triggers

Surveys the trigger surface — push, pull_request, workflow_dispatch, workflow_call, schedule, repository_dispatch, release, issue and issue_comment events, tags, and branch/path filters — for deciding what fires a workflow.

ci-cd github-actions book

6 — Expressions & Contexts

Details the github, env, vars, secrets, matrix, strategy, needs, runner, job, steps, and inputs/outputs contexts plus expression functions like hashFiles() used to make workflows conditional and data-driven.

ci-cd github-actions book

7 — Running Jobs

Covers sequential vs. parallel job execution, job dependencies via needs, conditional job/step execution, and continue-on-error semantics for fault-tolerant pipelines.

ci-cd github-actions book

8 — Matrix Builds

Explains matrix strategy fan-out, dynamic matrices computed at runtime, include/exclude overrides, and common OS and language matrix patterns.

ci-cd github-actions book

9 — Workflow Outputs

Covers job outputs, step outputs, and passing data between jobs and reusable workflows without relying on shared filesystem state.

ci-cd github-actions book

1 — Argo Workflows

Covers Argo Workflows' architecture, DAG-based workflow definitions, event integration, and scheduling as a Kubernetes-native CI/CD orchestration engine.

ci-cd orchestration book

2 — Tekton

Covers Tekton Pipelines, Tasks, the Tekton Catalog, and Triggers as the CRD-based building blocks of a Kubernetes-native, vendor-neutral CI/CD engine.

ci-cd orchestration book

3 — Jenkins Platform

Covers Jenkins controller architecture, agents, shared libraries, and the modern Jenkins (Configuration-as-Code, cloud-native agents) evolution.

ci-cd orchestration book

4 — Choosing the Right Platform

Compares GitHub Actions, Argo Workflows, Tekton, and Jenkins against organizational constraints, and covers hybrid models that combine more than one.

ci-cd orchestration book

1 — Release Engineering Fundamentals

Covers the release lifecycle, release planning, release trains, and versioning schemes as the fundamentals of disciplined release engineering.

ci-cd release-engineering book

2 — Release Automation

Covers automated releases, promotion pipelines, release validation gates, and rollback mechanics as the automation layer over manual release processes.

ci-cd release-engineering book

3 — Deployment Governance

Covers change approval workflows, risk assessment, compliance gates, and audit trails as the governance controls layered over deployment automation.

ci-cd release-engineering book

4 — Release Observability

Covers deployment metrics, failure analysis, release dashboards, and incident correlation — see platform-engineering-fundamentals' DORA metrics chapter for the underlying KPI definitions.

ci-cd release-engineering book

1 — Identity & Access Management

Covers identity and access management for a CI/CD platform — workload identity, human access, and the boundary between the two.

ci-cd security book

2 — Secret Management

Covers how a CI/CD platform stores, rotates, injects, and audits secrets used by pipelines and deployments.

ci-cd security book

3 — Policy as Code

Covers expressing security and compliance rules as versioned, testable policy-as-code enforced at pipeline gates.

ci-cd security book

4 — Secure Pipeline Design

Covers the design practices — least privilege, isolation, signed artifacts, hardened runners — that make a pipeline itself resistant to compromise.

ci-cd security book

5 — Software Supply Chain Security

Covers securing the end-to-end software supply chain from source to production — see kubernetes/08-supply-chain-security for SBOM, signing, and SLSA implementation detail.

ci-cd security book

6 — Compliance Automation

Covers automating compliance evidence collection and control enforcement directly inside the CI/CD platform rather than as a manual audit exercise.

ci-cd security book

7 — GitHub Actions: Authentication

Covers the GITHUB_TOKEN, fine-grained PATs, GitHub Apps, and OIDC federation to Azure, AWS, and GCP as the four authentication mechanisms available to a workflow.

ci-cd security book

8 — GitHub Actions: Secrets Management

Covers repository, organization, and environment secrets and variables, secret rotation, and least-privilege scoping for CI credentials.

ci-cd security book

9 — GitHub Actions: Secure Pipelines

Covers dependency review, CodeQL, secret scanning, artifact attestations, branch protection, required reviews, signed commits, and supply chain security gates enforced inside a workflow.

ci-cd security book

1 — Pipeline Metrics

Covers build duration, queue time, success rate, and failure rate as the core pipeline metrics a platform should expose by default.

ci-cd pipeline-observability book

2 — CI/CD Logging

Covers structured, centralized logging for pipeline runs — build logs, deployment logs, and audit logs — as a platform-provided capability.

ci-cd pipeline-observability book

3 — Pipeline Tracing

Covers distributed tracing across pipeline stages and services to diagnose where time and failures actually accumulate in a delivery flow.

ci-cd pipeline-observability book

4 — CI/CD Dashboards

Covers building dashboards that surface pipeline health, delivery throughput, and failure trends to both platform teams and their consumers.

ci-cd pipeline-observability book

5 — Delivery SLOs

Covers defining SLOs for the delivery platform itself — pipeline availability, queue latency, deployment success rate — as a product with its own reliability target.

ci-cd pipeline-observability book

6 — GitHub Actions: Notifications

Covers routing workflow status to Slack, Teams, email, GitHub notifications, and ChatOps integrations.

ci-cd pipeline-observability book

7 — GitHub Actions: Failure Analysis

Covers retry strategies, timeout tuning, debug logging, and treating a broken pipeline as an incident to respond to.

ci-cd pipeline-observability book

1 — High Availability

Covers designing the CI/CD control plane itself for high availability so pipeline outages don't become an organization-wide delivery outage.

ci-cd reliability book

2 — Scaling Pipeline Platforms

Covers horizontal and vertical scaling strategies for build farms, runners, and orchestration control planes as pipeline volume grows.

ci-cd reliability book

3 — Disaster Recovery

Covers backup, failover, and recovery procedures for CI/CD control planes, artifact stores, and pipeline state.

ci-cd reliability book

4 — Platform Capacity Planning

Covers forecasting build and deployment demand and provisioning runner and orchestration capacity ahead of it.

ci-cd reliability book

5 — Incident Response

Covers incident response specific to CI/CD platform outages — detection, triage, and communication when the delivery system itself is down.

ci-cd reliability book

1 — Multi-Cloud Delivery

Covers designing delivery pipelines that build and deploy consistently across more than one cloud provider.

ci-cd enterprise book

2 — Multi-Region Deployments

Covers coordinating deployments across multiple regions with staggered rollout, region-aware promotion, and blast-radius containment.

ci-cd enterprise book

3 — Multi-Tenant Pipeline Platforms

Covers isolating tenants — teams, business units, or customers — sharing a single CI/CD platform without leaking access, quota, or blast radius.

ci-cd enterprise book

4 — Platform Governance

Covers the organizational governance model — ownership, standards enforcement, exception handling — for a CI/CD platform used across an enterprise.

ci-cd enterprise book

5 — Platform Cost Engineering

Covers attributing and optimizing the cost of build compute, runner fleets, artifact storage, and pipeline minutes at enterprise scale.

ci-cd enterprise book

6 — Developer Experience

Covers measuring and improving the developer-facing experience of using the CI/CD platform — feedback latency, self-service, and cognitive load.

ci-cd enterprise book

7 — GitHub Actions: Cost Optimization

Covers GitHub Actions minutes billing, storage costs, self-hosted runner economics, and concrete techniques to reduce CI spend.

ci-cd enterprise book

1 — Pipeline Sprawl

Covers the anti-pattern of unbounded, inconsistent pipeline proliferation across teams with no shared standard or ownership.

ci-cd anti-patterns book

2 — Copy-Paste Pipelines

Covers the anti-pattern of duplicating pipeline definitions across repos instead of sharing templates, and the maintenance debt it creates.

ci-cd anti-patterns book

3 — Manual Releases

Covers the anti-pattern of releases that still depend on manual steps, and the risk and toil that persist as a result.

ci-cd anti-patterns book

4 — Shared Credentials

Covers the anti-pattern of long-lived, shared pipeline credentials instead of scoped, short-lived, workload-specific identity.

ci-cd anti-patterns book

5 — Long-Running Pipelines

Covers the anti-pattern of pipelines that grow slower over time without bound, and why that erodes developer trust in the platform.

ci-cd anti-patterns book

6 — Lack of Standardization

Covers the anti-pattern of every team inventing its own pipeline conventions, and the platform cost of not investing in shared standards.

ci-cd anti-patterns book

7 — Ignoring Pipeline Observability

Covers the anti-pattern of operating a CI/CD platform with no metrics, logs, or SLOs of its own, and the outages that follow.

ci-cd anti-patterns book

1 — CI/CD Platform System Design

Covers how to approach a CI/CD platform system design interview end to end — see system-design's dedicated CI/CD platform case study for a fully worked example.

ci-cd interview-prep book

2 — Designing Enterprise Build Platforms

Covers the interview framing for designing a distributed build platform at enterprise scale — requirements, architecture, and trade-offs.

ci-cd interview-prep book

3 — Progressive Delivery Design

Covers the interview framing for designing a progressive delivery system — feature flags, traffic shifting, automated verification, and rollback.

ci-cd interview-prep book

4 — GitHub Actions Interview Questions

GitHub Actions interview questions graded beginner through principal, for calibrating depth expected at each level.

ci-cd interview-prep book

5 — Release Engineering Case Studies

Walks through worked release-engineering case studies — release trains, promotion pipelines, rollback design — in interview format.

ci-cd interview-prep book

6 — Staff/Principal Platform Engineering Scenarios

Covers open-ended staff/principal-level platform engineering scenarios that probe organizational, not just technical, judgment.

ci-cd interview-prep book

7 — GitHub Actions: Enterprise Scenarios

Covers designing a CI platform, securing multi-tenant pipelines, monorepo-at-scale builds, thousands of concurrent builds, and a global runner fleet as MAANG-style design prompts.

ci-cd interview-prep book

8 — GitHub Actions: Case Studies

Walks CI/CD platform design through real-world shaped case studies — SaaS, microservices, monolith, and enterprise migration.

ci-cd interview-prep book

1 — CI/CD Platform Reference Architecture

A reference architecture diagram and component checklist consolidating the platform layers covered across the book.

ci-cd appendices book

10 — GitHub Actions: Practice Exams

Three full mock GH-200 exams with detailed answer explanations for exam-readiness self-assessment.

ci-cd appendices book

11 — GitHub Actions: Troubleshooting Playbook

A troubleshooting playbook for debugging pipeline failures, performance issues, security incidents, and production outages traced back to CI/CD.

ci-cd appendices book

12 — GitHub Actions: YAML Reference

A YAML syntax quick-reference for GitHub Actions workflow authoring.

ci-cd appendices book

13 — GitHub Actions Expression Cheat Sheet

A cheat sheet of GitHub Actions expression functions and operators.

ci-cd appendices book

14 — GitHub Actions: Context Reference

A reference of every built-in GitHub Actions context object and its fields.

ci-cd appendices book

15 — GitHub Actions: Marketplace Best Practices

Best practices for choosing, pinning, and auditing third-party Marketplace actions.

ci-cd appendices book

16 — GitHub Actions: GitHub CLI (gh) Reference

A gh CLI command reference for scripting GitHub Actions and repository operations.

ci-cd appendices book

17 — GitHub Actions: Common Error Messages

A lookup of common GitHub Actions error messages and their root causes.

ci-cd appendices book

18 — GitHub Actions: GH-200 Exam Checklist

A final GH-200 exam-day readiness checklist.

ci-cd appendices book

19 — GitHub Actions: MAANG Interview Checklist

A final MAANG CI/CD interview readiness checklist.

ci-cd appendices book

2 — GitHub Actions: Migration Guide

A migration guide for moving existing pipelines from Jenkins, Azure DevOps, or GitLab CI to GitHub Actions.

ci-cd appendices book

3 — Argo Workflows & Tekton Comparison Matrix

A side-by-side comparison matrix of Argo Workflows and Tekton across architecture, extensibility, and operational model.

ci-cd appendices book

4 — Progressive Delivery Decision Matrix

A decision matrix for choosing among rolling, blue-green, canary, and shadow deployment strategies based on risk and rollback needs.

ci-cd appendices book

5 — Software Supply Chain Security Checklist (SLSA, SBOM, Sigstore)

A checklist of SLSA levels, SBOM requirements, and Sigstore signing/verification steps for hardening a software supply chain.

ci-cd appendices book

6 — DORA Metrics & Delivery KPIs

A quick-reference of the four DORA metrics and related delivery KPIs — see platform-engineering-fundamentals' DORA metrics chapter for the full derivation.

ci-cd appendices book

7 — CI/CD Platform Maturity Model

A quick-reference recap of the five-stage platform maturity model introduced in Part I, for use as a self-assessment checklist.

ci-cd appendices book

8 — GitHub Actions: GH-200 Exam Objectives

Maps the GH-200 exam blueprint — workflow authoring, security, automation, runner administration, and governance — to the chapters in this book.

ci-cd appendices book

9 — GitHub Actions: Hands-on Labs

A set of 25 guided, hands-on labs built from realistic enterprise scenarios for GH-200 practice.

ci-cd appendices book

CI/CD Platform Engineering

A book-shaped table of contents for CI/CD platform engineering: pipeline foundations, build/artifact/delivery platforms, GitHub Actions end to end (workflow mechanics through enterprise governance), Argo Workflows, Tekton, Jenkins, release engineering, platform security, observability, reliability, enterprise governance, and MAANG interview preparation — cross-linking existing tech/kubernetes/platform-engineering-fundamentals/system-design notes instead of duplicating them.

ci-cd book reference maang-prep

06 — Build & Release

From local dev to production: CI/CD, releases, deploys, and rollbacks.

ShipSolid CI/CD
Jun 9, 2026

CI/CD Pipeline Guide

How platform changes flow through CI/CD.

ShipSolid CI/CD
Jun 9, 2026

Deployment Runbooks

Step-by-step deployment runbooks per component.

ShipSolid CI/CD
Jun 9, 2026

Development Environment Setup

Set up a local dev environment to work on platform config.

ShipSolid CI/CD
Jun 9, 2026

Release Notes

Per-release notes.

ShipSolid CI/CD
Jun 9, 2026

Release Process

The platform release process — cadence, versioning, and approvals.

ShipSolid CI/CD
Jun 9, 2026

Rollback Procedures

How to roll back each component safely.

ShipSolid CI/CD
Jun 9, 2026

Adopting the ShipSolid Central Terraform CI/CD Pipeline

- Org consistency across all ShipSolid Terraform repos (Grafana Cloud IaC, SDLC Portal infra,

ShipSolid CI/CD
May 1, 2026

CI/CD Overview

The repo currently uses three CI/CD layers:

ShipSolid CI/CD
May 1, 2026

Code Standards

This document defines the mandatory code standards for all services and infrastructure in this

ShipSolid CI/CD
May 1, 2026

Migrating to Terraform Cloud (TFC / HCP Terraform)

Migrating to Terraform Cloud (TFC / HCP Terraform) is mostly mechanical, but there's one

ShipSolid CI/CD
May 1, 2026

Naming Conventions

This document defines the naming patterns for all resources, files, and artifacts in this monorepo.

ShipSolid CI/CD
May 1, 2026

Pre-commit Hooks

This repo uses [pre-commit](https://pre-commit.

ShipSolid CI/CD
May 1, 2026

Terraform Driver Styles

The repo runs Terraform two different ways.

ShipSolid CI/CD
May 1, 2026