Modern CI/CD Pipelines: A Practical Guide

Why CI/CD Matters

Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment are not just buzzwords — they're essential practices that reduce bugs, speed up delivery, and give your team confidence in every release.

Pipeline Architecture

A well-designed pipeline should include:

1. Lint & Type Check — Catch issues before they compile
2. Unit Tests — Fast, isolated, comprehensive
3. Integration Tests — Verify component interactions
4. Build — Compile and bundle
5. Deploy to Staging — Automated preview deployments
6. E2E Tests — Verify critical user flows
7. Deploy to Production — With rollback capability

GitHub Actions Example

We use GitHub Actions for all our pipelines. The key is to make jobs parallel where possible and use caching aggressively.

Docker Multi-Stage Builds

Multi-stage builds keep your production images small while maintaining a developer-friendly build process. Our production Node.js images went from 1.2GB to 120MB.

Conclusion

Invest in your CI/CD pipeline early. The time you spend upfront will pay dividends in developer productivity and system reliability.