CI/CD Implementation Services

What CI/CD means

Continuous integration (CI) means every code change is automatically built and tested as soon as it is pushed, so problems are caught within minutes. Continuous delivery and deployment (CD) extend this by automatically preparing — and optionally releasing — tested changes to staging and production.

Together, CI/CD replaces manual, error-prone release steps with a repeatable pipeline. Teams release smaller changes more often, roll back easily when something goes wrong and spend less time on release logistics.

Problems we solve

• Builds that work on one developer’s machine but not another
• Bugs reaching production because tests are run manually or not at all
• Release days that take hours of coordination
• No easy way to roll back a bad deployment
• Security issues in dependencies discovered months later

What’s included

A typical pipeline

1. CommitSeconds

   Linting and formatting checks run as soon as code is pushed.

2. Build & testMinutes

   The app is built and unit and integration tests run in parallel.

3. ScanMinutes

   Dependencies, secrets and containers are checked for known vulnerabilities.

4. Deploy to stagingAutomatic

   The change is deployed to staging and end-to-end tests run.

5. ReleaseOn approval or automatic

   Production deployment with health checks and automatic rollback on failure.

Keeping pipelines fast

A pipeline that takes an hour is a pipeline developers try to bypass. We aim for feedback within ten minutes on most changes by caching dependencies, running tests in parallel, only rebuilding what changed and moving slower suites to later stages. Flaky tests are tracked and fixed rather than retried silently, so the team keeps trusting the results.

Timeline and budget

Typical ranges to help you plan. Your written estimate comes after a free discovery call.

Choosing a CI/CD platform

The best platform is usually the one closest to where your code already lives. We avoid migrating platforms unless the current one is a real constraint.

Deployment strategies

• Rolling — instances are replaced gradually; simple and common.
• Blue-green — a full new environment is prepared and traffic switches at once, with instant rollback.
• Canary — a small share of traffic receives the new version first while metrics are watched.
• Feature flags — code is deployed dark and features are enabled separately, decoupling release from deployment.

Security in the pipeline

Pipelines hold the keys to production, so they must be protected like production. We use short-lived credentials through OIDC instead of long-lived secrets, protect main branches, require reviews for pipeline changes and add automated checks for vulnerable dependencies, leaked secrets and container image issues.

• No production secrets stored in repository settings where avoidable
• Signed and scanned build artefacts
• Separate permissions for build and deploy stages
• Audit trail of who deployed what and when

CI/CD maturity levels

Most teams get the biggest gains moving from level 1 or 2 to level 3.

Implementing CI/CD step by step

1. Audit the current process1 week

   Document how code moves from a laptop to production today, and where it breaks.

2. Standardise builds

   Reproducible builds with pinned dependencies and container images where suitable.

3. Test automation baseline

   Unit tests and a small set of smoke tests that run in minutes.

4. Automated deployments

   Staging deploys on every merge; production via approval with rollback.

5. Environment parity

   Infrastructure as code so staging and production match.

6. Measure and refine

   Track deployment frequency, lead time, failure rate and recovery time.

Measuring delivery performance

The DORA research programme popularised four measures that indicate how well software delivery works. They are useful for spotting trends in your own team, not for comparing teams against each other.

Pipelines for different kinds of software

• Web apps — build, test, container image, deploy to staging, smoke test, promote to production.
• Mobile apps — signed builds, distribution to TestFlight and internal testing tracks, staged store rollouts.
• Infrastructure — Terraform plan on pull requests, reviewed apply on merge.
• Data and ML — schema migrations, data quality checks and model evaluation before promotion.
• WordPress and CMS sites — version-controlled themes and plugins, automated database backups before deploy.

Common CI/CD pitfalls

• Flaky tests that teams learn to ignore
• Pipelines that take 40 minutes, so developers batch changes
• Secrets stored in pipeline files or repositories
• Database migrations that cannot be rolled back
• Production deployed from a developer laptop “just this once”
• No alerting after deployment, so failures are found by customers

CI/CD pairs with automated testing, infrastructure as code and DevOps consulting.

Database changes in the pipeline

Application code is easy to roll back; databases are not. We manage schema changes as versioned migrations that run automatically in the pipeline, test them against a copy of production-like data and follow the expand-and-contract pattern: add new columns or tables first, release code that uses both old and new structures, then remove the old ones in a later release. This keeps every deployment reversible and avoids downtime during schema changes.

• Migrations reviewed alongside the code that needs them
• Backups taken automatically before production migrations
• Long-running data changes split into background jobs
• Alerts if a migration runs longer than expected

What you receive at the end

• Pipelines defined as code in your repository
• Documentation of each stage and how to change it
• Runbook for releasing, rolling back and handling failures
• Dashboards for delivery metrics
• A handover session with your developers

After handover, teams can extend the pipelines themselves, and we remain available for reviews or support as the product grows.

Related services

CI/CD is a core part of DevOps consulting and works best with infrastructure as code and automated testing.

This page is part of Cloud & DevOps Services — see the full overview for related services, approach and pricing.