# 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](https://wiki.playquorum.dev/research/ci.md), 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](https://wiki.playquorum.dev/incidents/bad-deploy.md) 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](https://wiki.playquorum.dev/components/cluster.md) 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](https://wiki.playquorum.dev/incidents/bad-deploy.md)

- **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](https://wiki.playquorum.dev/research/ci.md).
- **Prevent:** Pick a strategy with a smaller blast radius, such as Canary or Blue-green, ship smaller batches, and research [Automated tests](https://wiki.playquorum.dev/research/testing-culture.md).

## 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

[Kubernetes Cluster](https://wiki.playquorum.dev/components/cluster.md)

## Research next

Once you own Continuous delivery, these Research items build on it.

[Blue-green deploys](https://wiki.playquorum.dev/research/blue-green.md), [Canary deploys](https://wiki.playquorum.dev/research/canary.md), [Automated tests](https://wiki.playquorum.dev/research/testing-culture.md), [Dependency scanning](https://wiki.playquorum.dev/research/dependency-scanning.md), [Feature flags](https://wiki.playquorum.dev/research/feature-flags.md), [Trunk-based development](https://wiki.playquorum.dev/research/trunk-based.md)

## Facts

CI/CD Pipeline
- **Code:** ci
- **Real product:** GitHub Actions
- **Group:** Platform
- **Unlocked by:** [Continuous delivery](https://wiki.playquorum.dev/research/ci.md)
- **Era:** [Pre-seed](https://wiki.playquorum.dev/eras/pre-seed.md)
- **Place:** $100 first copy
- **Burn:** $0.02/s
- **Sizes:** 1
- **Overhead:** 1 ms
- **Takes:** —
- **Sends:** —

## See also

- [Continuous delivery](https://wiki.playquorum.dev/research/ci.md)
- [Components](https://wiki.playquorum.dev/components.md)

Source: https://wiki.playquorum.dev/components/ci