System 12.29 — CI/CD Platform
In one line
The delivery pipeline as a product: stages, artifacts, approvals, blue/green and canary deployment.
Think of it like this
A factory conveyor belt that takes a programmer's code change all the way from 'just written' to 'safely running for millions of users,' with automatic checks and a safety brake (rollback) at every stage.
Key ideas
- 01
Pipelines as config (YAML DAG): build → test → artifact → deploy → smoke; every stage rewritable and re-runnable.
- 02
Build service: container builds (cache layers, secrets); artifact registry: immutable, signed, audit-trail.
- 03
Deploy strategies: blue/green (switch traffic), canary (5%→50%→100%), rolling (gradual).
- 04
Canary safety: metrics compare on the canary BEFORE full rollout; auto-rollback on error-rate breach.
- 05
The platform = scheduler (12.24) + artifact registry + target clusters + deployment controller + approval gates.
- 06
Audit vs speed: compliance gates (who approves prod) are the human-motion part; everything else automatable.
- 07
Interviews: 'build → registry → canary with metrics gates and auto-rollback' — that sentence carries the design.
Code & diagrams
Every stage can fail and roll back independently — the canary stage is where the safety actually lives.
Explain without notes
Canary at 10% breaching error SLO — walk the auto-rollback and what records you keep.
Practice
Design the deployment state machine (current/target/rolling/canary) and its safety gates.
Trade-offs
- ↔
Automation speed vs compliance control — the platform encodes policy, the org sets the dial.
Run it in production
You've designed it. Now build, operate, and break the same idea hands-on in the DevOps courses:
Completion checklist
I can present CI/CD with builds, immutable registry, canary + auto-rollback, and approval gates.