Originally published on the Edilec blog: https://edilec.com/blog/cld-3102/ci-cd-pipelines-for-growing-products/
CI/CD pipelines for growing products should reduce the uncertainty of change, not merely reduce the number of clicks before production. A dependable pipeline answers five questions for every release: what changed, who reviewed it, which immutable artifact was tested, which policy allowed it to advance, and how the team will detect and recover from harm.
Define the release contract
Write down the unit that moves through the pipeline: container digest, signed package, mobile build or versioned function bundle. Define the environments it crosses, required evidence, approval authority, exposure strategy and recovery objective. Classify changes by consequence: a documentation-only update, a stateless API patch, a schema migration and an identity-policy change should not share an identical path.
Create one trusted build artifact
