CI/CD Pipeline
Ships what waits. Its deploy strategy sets how long a deploy takes, what it burns, and how bad a bad deploy is.
The CI/CD Pipeline takes finished work and puts it into production, as GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, or Argo CD do.
When to place it#
Place it as soon as you ship more than a Feature a day. A Pipeline cuts deploy time from 30 minutes to minutes, so the Team's Features reach users sooner. It unlocks with Continuous delivery, which also lets you roll a Bad deploy back.
How it works#
It takes no traffic and sends none on, so you link nothing into it or out of it. It changes how a deploy happens: how often the Team can ship, what the Pipeline costs while it exists, and how far a Bad deploy reaches.
Every deploy ships the Features that finished since the last one. Without a Pipeline a deploy is manual and takes 30 minutes. With one it takes as long as its strategy says, and the strategy sets the rest.
More deploys mean smaller batches, and a smaller batch is a smaller bad deploy. That is the best reason to place a Pipeline early.
Options#
The card has one setting, the deploy strategy. Rolling is the default, and the one an old save opens on.
| Deploy strategy | Deploy time | Bad deploy blast radius | Burn |
|---|---|---|---|
| Recreate | 2 min | Up to 100% | 1× the Pipeline |
| Rolling | 5 min | Up to 40% | 1× the Pipeline |
| Blue-green | 7 min | Up to 10% | 2× the Pipeline |
| Canary | 10 min | Up to 5% | 1.5× the Pipeline |
A bad deploy fails 8% of App Server requests for each Feature its batch shipped, and the strategy sets the ceiling on that:
Recreate swaps every server at once, so nothing holds the bug back. It is fastest and cheapest, and the worst one to be wrong under.
Rolling replaces a slice at a time and can be stopped.
Blue-green serves from the old fleet while the new one comes up, so only its slice sees the bug. It pays for the second fleet.
Canary sends 5% of traffic first and waits. It is the safest and ships least often.
Deploy times and Burn multipliers are this game's own numbers, chosen to make the trade real.
How it fails#
A slow strategy ships fewer Features a day: 10-minute Canary deploys against Move fast's 16 a day lose a fifth of them.
Recreate has no ceiling. A batch of a dozen Features breaks every request until you roll back.
Blue-green and Canary cost more Burn every second they exist, not only while they deploy.
A Pipeline without a Kubernetes Cluster or a Platform team still pays the slow part, because the Stack's build time is untouched.
Canary is worth its Burn only if you watch the Bad deploy bar and roll back. The bug sits in 5% of traffic until you act.
Bad deploy#
Signs: The Bad deploy bar appears at the top of the board, and the error rate jumps right after a deploy.
Do now: Click Roll back on the bar. It is locked until you research Continuous delivery.
Prevent: Pick a strategy with a smaller blast radius, such as Canary or Blue-green, ship smaller batches, and research Automated tests.
Tips#
Pick the strategy by what a bad deploy costs you.
Pair Rolling with a Cluster: a Cluster's deploy stops after its first batch of pods, so a bad deploy breaks a quarter of the Rolling ceiling.
Rules#
- Each further copy costs 25% more than the one before.
- Selling it refunds 50% of what its last copy cost.
- It has one size.
Works with#
Research next#
Once you own Continuous delivery, these Research items build on it.
Blue-green deploys, Canary deploys, Automated tests, Dependency scanning, Feature flags, Trunk-based development