Design multi-stage CI/CD pipelines with approval gates, security checks, and deployment orchestration. Use this skill when designing zero-downtime deployment pipelines, implementing canary rollout strategies, setting up multi-environment promotion workflows, or debugging failed deployment gates in CI/CD.
Design multi-stage CI/CD pipelines with approval gates, security checks, and deployment orchestration. Use this skill when designing zero-downtime deployment pipelines, implementing canary rollout strategies, setting up multi-environment promotion workflows, or debugging failed deployment gates in CI/CD.
Deployment Pipeline Design
Architecture patterns for multi-stage CI/CD pipelines with approval gates, deployment strategies, and environment promotion workflows.
Purpose
Design robust, secure deployment pipelines that balance speed with safety through proper stage organization, automated quality gates, and progressive delivery strategies. This skill covers both the structural design of pipeline architecture and the operational patterns for reliable production deployments.
Input / Output
What You Provide
Application type: Language/runtime, containerized or bare-metal, monolith or microservices
: Kubernetes, ECS, VMs, serverless, or platform-as-a-service
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Monitoring stack: Prometheus, Datadog, CloudWatch, or other metrics sources used for automated promotion decisions
What This Skill Produces
Pipeline configuration: Stage definitions, job dependencies, parallelism, and caching strategy
Deployment strategy: Chosen rollout pattern with annotated configuration (canary weights, blue-green switchover, rolling parameters)
Health check setup: Shallow vs deep readiness probes, post-deployment smoke test scripts
Gate definitions: Automated metric thresholds and manual approval workflows
Rollback plan: Automated rollback triggers and manual runbook steps
When to Use
Design CI/CD architecture for a new service or platform migration
Implement deployment gates between environments
Configure multi-environment pipelines with mandatory security scanning
Establish progressive delivery with canary or blue-green strategies
Debug pipelines where stages succeed but production behavior is wrong
Reduce mean time to recovery by automating rollback on metric degradation
Detailed patterns and worked examples
Detailed pattern documentation lives in references/details.md. Read that file when the navigation tier above is insufficient.
Troubleshooting
Health check passes in pipeline but service is unhealthy in production
The pipeline health check is hitting a shallow /ping endpoint that returns 200 even when the database is unreachable. Use a deep readiness check that verifies actual dependencies (see Health Checks section above).
Canary deployment never promotes to 100%
Argo Rollouts requires a valid AnalysisTemplate to auto-promote. If the Prometheus query returns no data (e.g., metric name changed), the analysis stays inconclusive and promotion stalls. Add inconclusiveLimit so the rollout fails fast rather than hanging:
spec:metrics:-name:error-ratefailureCondition:"result[0] > 0.05"inconclusiveLimit:2# fail after 2 inconclusive results, not hang indefinitelyprovider:prometheus:query:|
sum(rate(http_requests_total{status=~"5.."}[2m]))
/ sum(rate(http_requests_total[2m]))
Staging deploy succeeds but production job never starts
Check that production environment protection rules are configured — a missing reviewer assignment means the approval gate waits indefinitely with no notification. In GitHub Actions, ensure Required reviewers is set to an existing user or team in Settings → Environments → production.
Docker layer cache busted on every run causing slow builds
If COPY . . appears before dependency installation, any source file change invalidates the dependency layer. Reorder to copy dependency manifests first:
# Good: dependencies cached separately from source code
COPY package*.json ./
RUN npm ci
COPY . .
RUN npm run build
Rollback leaves database migrations applied to old code
A service rollback without a migration rollback causes schema/code mismatch errors. Always make migrations backward-compatible (additive only) for at least one release cycle, and keep undo scripts versioned alongside the migration:
