CI/CD
Continuous integration and delivery, and the architecture that caps them.
4 to work through
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beginner
A team's CI pipeline takes 40 minutes. Everyone agrees that is annoying but tolerable, because engineers do other work while they wait. Why does the 40 minutes change what engineers do rather than only how long they wait?
2 min answer -
intermediate
Your monorepo runs 320 pipelines a day. Median wait before a runner picks up a job is 11 minutes; the pipeline itself takes 14. Finance asks whether doubling the runner pool is worth $9k a month. Work out the number that answers them.
2 min answer -
advanced
A developer platform's CI system faces a burst of builds after a major release. How should queues, workers, caching and prioritisation prevent collapse?
2 min answer -
advanced
A team has a fully automated pipeline and still releases monthly. What is actually blocking them?
2 min answer
2 terms in this topic
CI/CD
Integrating continuously and keeping the software always releasable — a discipline about batch size, with automation as its enabler.
metricPipeline Feedback Latency
The time from pushing a change to knowing whether it passed, which sets the batch size engineers choose and therefore the size of every review, deplo…
Neighbouring topics
Software Architecture
General material on the engineering underneath an architecture.
SOLID
Five design principles, two of which scale beyond the class.
Domain-Driven Design
Ubiquitous language, bounded contexts and context mapping.
Bounded Contexts
Where one model ends and another begins, and why forcing one fails.
Clean Architecture
Concentric layers with dependencies pointing only inwards.
Hexagonal Architecture
Ports defined by the domain, adapters supplied by infrastructure.
Microservices
Independent deployability, and the distributed problems it buys.
Modular Monolith
Enforced internal boundaries without a network between them.
Service Boundaries
Drawing lines along change patterns rather than technical layers.
Design Patterns
Reusable solutions at code level, and when they become ceremony.
Refactoring
Changing structure without changing behaviour, in verified steps.
Technical Debt
Deliberate, tracked and repaid — as distinct from mess.
Testing Strategies
The pyramid, and the contract tests distributed systems add to it.
Contract Tests
Capturing what consumers actually use, not what the API documents.
Release Strategies
Blue-green, canary, shadow and progressive delivery.
Feature Flags
Decoupling deploy from release, with an expiry date.
Trunk-Based Development
Short-lived branches, and unmerged work as inventory.
Code Review
Where architectural rules are enforced by people rather than by tools.
DORA Metrics
Throughput and stability moving together rather than trading off.