CI/CD Patterns Skill

Purpose

Best practices for continuous integration and deployment pipelines.

Auto-Invoke Triggers

• •Setting up CI/CD pipelines
• •Configuring automated deployments
• •Implementing quality gates
• •Managing environments

Pipeline Stages

Standard Pipeline

Commit → Build → Test → Analyze → Deploy (Staging) → Deploy (Production)

Stage Responsibilities

Branch Strategy

Git Flow

Trunk-Based Development

Quality Gates

Build Stage

• • Code compiles without errors
• • Dependencies resolve
• • Build artifacts created

Test Stage

• • Unit tests pass (100%)
• • Coverage threshold met (> 70%)
• • Integration tests pass
• • No test flakiness

Analysis Stage

• • No linting errors
• • No critical security issues
• • No new technical debt

Deploy Stage

• • Health checks pass
• • Smoke tests pass
• • No errors in logs

Environment Strategy

Environment Types

Environment Parity

• •Keep environments as similar as possible
• •Use same database type
• •Use same infrastructure (scaled down)
• •Use environment variables for differences

Deployment Strategies

Blue-Green Deployment

• •Two identical environments (Blue/Green)
• •Deploy to inactive environment
• •Switch traffic after verification
• •Easy rollback (switch back)

Canary Deployment

• •Deploy to small percentage of users
• •Monitor errors and metrics
• •Gradually increase traffic
• •Full rollback if issues

Rolling Deployment

• •Update instances one at a time
• •No downtime
• •Mixed versions during deploy
• •Slower rollback

Strategy Selection

Secrets Management

Rules

• •Never commit secrets to git
• •Use environment-specific secrets
• •Rotate secrets regularly
• •Audit secret access

Secret Storage

Artifact Management

Versioning

• •Use semantic versioning (MAJOR.MINOR.PATCH)
• •Tag releases in git
• •Include commit SHA in build metadata
• •Version artifacts consistently

Retention

Rollback Strategy

Automated Rollback Triggers

• •Health check failures
• •Error rate spike (> 5%)
• •Response time degradation
• •Memory/CPU threshold breach

Rollback Process

1. •Detect failure (automated monitoring)
2. •Trigger rollback (automated or manual)
3. •Deploy previous version
4. •Verify health
5. •Investigate root cause

Rollback Requirements

• •Keep N-1 version deployable
• •Database migrations must be backward compatible
• •Feature flags for risky changes
• •Test rollback procedure regularly

Pipeline Optimization

Speed Improvements

• •Parallelize independent stages
• •Cache dependencies
• •Use incremental builds
• •Skip unchanged components
• •Use faster runners/agents

Target Times

Notifications

When to Notify

Channels

• •Slack/Teams for team notifications
• •Email for stakeholders
• •PagerDuty for critical failures

Best Practices

DO

• •Fail fast (run quick checks first)
• •Use infrastructure as code
• •Version your pipeline configuration
• •Test pipeline changes in feature branches
• •Monitor pipeline metrics
• •Document deployment process

DON'T

• •Skip tests to save time
• •Deploy on Fridays
• •Deploy without monitoring
• •Ignore flaky tests
• •Manual production deploys
• •Store secrets in pipeline config

CI/CD Checklist

Pipeline Setup

• • Build stage configured
• • All test types included
• • Linting and formatting checks
• • Security scanning enabled
• • Deployment stages defined

Quality

• • Quality gates enforced
• • Coverage thresholds set
• • No secret in code
• • Artifacts versioned

Deployment

• • Staging environment exists
• • Rollback procedure tested
• • Health checks configured
• • Notifications set up
• • Monitoring in place