The pipeline

Here is what happens when Finn merges, in the forty minutes after the button, with nobody touching anything.

The merge wakes a pipelineConcept · lights on your mappipelineThe automated sequence a change rides from merge toward production: build it, run the pyramid, deploy to staging, smoke test, promote. Defined in code, versioned in the repo, and every stage is a gate.: the automated gauntlet every change must ride. Build the thing. Run the pyramid, all of it. Deploy to staging. Smoke test. Promote. Each stage is a gate, and failing any gate stops the ride there, loudly. The pipeline itself is defined in a file in the repo, versioned like everything else, which means even the gauntlet has a diff and a reviewer.

The two continuouses

The habit of merging small and often, with the bots checking every merge, is continuous integrationConcept · lights on your mapcontinuous integrationCI: merging into shared main frequently, with every merge triggering automatic build-and-test. “CI is red” means the bots found a problem, and fixing it outranks new work., and it is the direct cure for week three’s merge-conflict afternoon: branches that live for days, not months. When the checks are red, the team’s rule is absolute and cultural at once: fixing main outranks everything.

Past the checks, philosophy forks. continuous deliveryConcept · lights on your mapcontinuous deliveryCD, the delivery kind: every change that survives the pipeline is packaged and proven deployable, with a human still pressing the final button. A loaded, tested release, ready at all times. keeps a human on the last button: every survivor is proven ready, and a person decides when. Its bolder sibling, continuous deploymentConcept · lights on your mapcontinuous deploymentThe bolder CD: changes passing every automated gate deploy to production automatically, no button. Merge at 10:14, live by 10:40. Requires deep trust in the pyramid., removes the button entirely, and code that passes every gate simply goes. Traversal runs the first kind in the weeks before a race and admires the second kind from a respectful distance, which is a reasonable place for a company with one unmissable Sunday a year to stand.

The umbrella acronym for the whole machine is CI/CDConcept · lights on your mapCI/CDThe umbrella acronym for the automated build-test-deploy machinery. The infrastructure that turned shipping from a quarterly event into a daily non-event., and the sentence it earned is the one worth keeping: CI/CD is what turned shipping software from a quarterly ceremony into ordinary work.

Forty minutes after any merge, the newest buildConcept · lights on your mapbuild (artifact)The runnable thing the pipeline manufactures from source code: compiled, bundled, packaged, ready to ship. “The build is broken” means this step failed and nothing can move until it is fixed. of the cheer feature is proven and parked one human button from production. On a quiet Tuesday nine days before Maple Grove, Priya presses the button, and the feature is in production. It is also, and this is the next scene’s whole idea, completely invisible.