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CI-CD Standards

Document: 28-ci-cd-standards.md
Version: 1.0.0

Purpose

This document defines the Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery (CD) standards used across all Rundown projects.

CI/CD automates repetitive engineering tasks such as code validation, testing, building, and deployment while maintaining human oversight for significant release decisions.

The objective is to improve reliability, consistency, and developer productivity without sacrificing engineering judgment.

CI/CD Philosophy

Automation should eliminate repetitive work.

Human engineers should remain responsible for decisions that require context, business understanding, or architectural judgment.

CI/CD exists to increase confidence—not replace responsibility.

Responsibilities

The CI/CD pipeline owns:

Non-Responsibilities

The CI/CD pipeline should not own:

Automation supports engineering; it does not replace it.

Standard Platform

Rundown standardizes on:

GitHub Actions

Reasons include:

Continuous Integration (CI)

Every Pull Request should automatically execute:

No Pull Request should be merged if mandatory CI checks fail.

Continuous Delivery (CD)

After code is merged into main:

Production deployment should require explicit approval.

Pipeline Stages

Standard pipeline:

Pull Request

↓

CI Validation

↓

Merge to Main

↓

Build

↓

Docker Image

↓

Deploy to Staging

↓

Validation

↓

Production Approval

↓

Deploy to Production

Every stage should complete successfully before progressing to the next.

Quality Gates

Quality gates should prevent deployments when:

Quality gates protect production from avoidable issues.

Build Artifacts

Build outputs should be:

The same artifact validated in staging should be promoted to production whenever practical.

Secrets Management

CI/CD secrets should:

Production secrets should only be available to production workflows.

Notifications

Pipeline notifications should report:

Notifications should provide actionable information without creating unnecessary noise.

Failure Handling

If the pipeline fails:

  1. Stop further execution.

  2. Report the failure.

  3. Investigate the cause.

  4. Correct the issue.

  5. Restart the pipeline.

Manual workarounds should be avoided unless formally documented.

Workflow Files

CI/CD workflows should remain:

Workflow definitions should evolve alongside the application.

Engineering Decision

Human-Guided Automation

Status: Accepted

Decision

Rundown automates repetitive engineering tasks while retaining human approval for production releases.

Reasoning

This approach:

CI/CD Checklist

Before enabling a deployment pipeline, verify:

Summary

CI/CD provides the automation layer for Rundown's deployment workflow.

By automating repetitive validation and deployment tasks while preserving human decision-making for critical releases, Rundown achieves reliable software delivery without introducing unnecessary operational complexity.