CI/CD Platform  ·  View 03 of 22  ·  People and journeys

Actors and Their Core Journeys

Nine actors, three of them machines, and the goals they would state in their own words.

Editable source SVG draw.io All views
Inside the company Application engineer 4,200 in 610 teams Goal — Tell me in minutes whether my change is safe to merge, and if it is not, tell me what I broke rather than making me guess. Core journeys Get a green check Reproduce a red job Code reviewer every merge Goal — Let me trust the check beside the diff so I review the change instead of re-running the build. Core journeys Read the evidence on a PR Platform engineer 14 people Goal — Keep 40,000 slots busy without letting one monorepo starve everyone else, and know when a failure is ours. Core journeys Rebalance entitlements Triage infra-failure ratio Accountable for what ships Release owner 9 business units Goal — Ship exactly the bits we tested, and be able to take them back in five minutes without a rebuild. Core journeys Promote and roll back Security engineer policy owner Goal — Make the safe path the default path, so no team has to remember to be careful about a fork build. Core journeys Change a gate policy Answer an audit request Outside the company Outside contributor ~300 per quarter Goal — Get my fix tested and reviewed without being treated as an attacker, or left waiting with no reason given. Core journeys Land a fork contribution Auditor 2 reviews per year Goal — Show me, for one image in production, which commit produced it and who approved it. Core journeys Trace an image to a commit Machines in the cast Scheduled trigger 18k runs/night Goal — Use the capacity nobody else wants, and get out of the way when a human is waiting. Core journeys Run nightly on spare capacity Review bot lint and SAST Goal — Post findings on the diff fast enough to be read before the human reviewer arrives. Core journeys Post findings on a PR CI/CD Platform — Actors and Their Core Journeys Person or role Journey / task External / third party Security / platform Three journeys get their own map: the engineer's green check, the fork contribution, and the release promotion. They fail in different places. v 1.0 · owner Platform Engineering · date 2026-09

What this view settles

  • The outside contributor and the auditor are in the cast. A platform designed only for the engineer who works here gets the fork case wrong and the evidence case late.
  • The scheduled trigger is an actor with a goal — use the capacity nobody wants, and get out of the way when a human is waiting — which is the whole justification for priority tiers.
  • The platform engineer's goal names the fairness problem: 40,000 slots busy without one monorepo starving everyone else.

Three journeys get their own map

  • The engineer's green check — the loop that decides whether the platform is used at all.
  • The fork contribution — the case where safety and welcome pull in opposite directions.
  • The release promotion — the case where the evidence chain either holds or does not.

Assumptions

  • 14 platform engineers for 610 tenants; 18,000 scheduled runs a night; two audit reviews a year.
◀  High-Level Architecture All views Journey — Waiting for a Green Check  ▶
Solution Architecture v1.0 · Amazon Web Services · Platform Architecture · 2026-0903-actors-and-journeys