A good CI/CD pipeline is something you don't notice. It just delivers. Safely, traceably, and fast enough that the team can move at the pace of the business.
Pipeline architecture — GitHub Actions or Azure Pipelines, modular, with reusable workflows and templates. Build once, deploy many.
GitOps for delivery — Argo CD or Flux. The pipeline builds and signs artifacts; the cluster pulls from Git. Clear separation between CI and CD.
Secure supply chain — image signing with Cosign, SBOM generation, vulnerability scanning on pull request, and policies that block unsigned artifacts at admission.
Secrets handling — OIDC-based connections to Azure (no long-lived keys), Workload Identity, and Key Vault references at runtime.
Test, quality and gates — automated tests, code quality gates, dependency review and contract tests where they make sense. Requirements as code, not as manual checklists.
Multi-environment — dev, test, staging, production through the same code path. Environment protection, approval gates and full traceability of what's deployed where.
Rollbacks and recovery — Argo CD app history, signed image tags, and documented runbooks for when something needs to be reversed quickly.
Reduction in annual infrastructure cost — without compromise on performance or delivery speed.
Read the full storyUsually GitHub Actions if the code lives in GitHub — it's simpler, easier to read, and integrates better with modern tooling. Azure Pipelines fits when there's significant existing investment, or for businesses that already lean on Azure DevOps. I work with both daily.
Yes, and it's one of the things that delivers the most value. Reusable workflows, templates and a shared catalogue of building blocks usually reduce active pipelines by 70% and make the rest easier to maintain.
For one team and one service: 1–2 weeks, including environments, signing and rollback procedures. For an entire organisation at platform level: 6–10 weeks for the first set, then incrementally as more teams come on.
Not strictly, but it helps. GitOps makes production state traceable and reversible through Git. For teams new to Kubernetes I often recommend starting with classic pipeline-deploy and gradually adding GitOps when the pain of manual state management becomes obvious.
Get in touch for a no-obligation conversation. Often a short assessment is enough to see where the biggest gains are.