FDE Foundations · Module 9: Production
CI/CD for Customer Deliveries
A delivery pipeline is your reliability contract: every change passes the same gates, the same artifact moves up through environments, and humans approve the customer-facing steps.
11 min reading
Objectives
- Build a pipeline: lint, test, contract tests, build, deploy
- Gate deploys on checks and produce artifacts
- Promote the same artifact through environments
The stages
A working pipeline for a small service: lint and typecheck, unit tests, integration tests with dependencies, contract tests against external systems, image build with provenance, deploy to staging, smoke tests, then the customer-environment deploy behind an approval. Each stage fails the pipeline loudly; nothing proceeds on red.
One artifact, many environments
Build the image once and promote the same digest through staging and production. Rebuilding per environment reintroduces drift: the thing you tested is not the thing you shipped. Configuration differs by environment; the artifact does not.
Customer change windows
Customer environments have change-approval processes: maintenance windows, CAB meetings, security scans on new images. Plan deploys around those windows and submit what their process needs early (change description, rollback plan, test evidence). The pipeline makes the evidence automatic: pipeline run link, test results, artifact digest.
Fast feedback
Keep the pipeline under ten minutes or engineers stop waiting for it. Parallelize, cache dependencies, and keep the slow end-to-end suite on a schedule instead of every commit.
Quick check
An optional 2-3 question self-check. Answers never leave your device, are not stored, and never count toward any assessment.
Exercise
Design the CI/CD for a fictional invoice service: ordered stages with approximate durations, the promotion path of the artifact, and the change-window plan for a customer with a weekly CAB.
Pass criteria
Stages ordered with gates, one-artifact promotion stated with digest, and the CAB plan includes what evidence is submitted and when.