DevOpsSpeakeasy Podcast S01E13: Kelsey Hightower and Melissa McKay on Tradeoffs in CI/CD

In this episode Baruch (@jbaruch) hosted Kelsey Hightower (@kelseyhightower) and Melissa McKay(@melissajmckay) to discuss some of the great questions the audience asked during the "Demystifying CI/CD" webinar, they conducted a week prior. As the discussion progressed, it turned out that the answer to most of the questions is "it depends, it is really a tradeoff". Who could have thought!

• Continuous delivery vs. continuous deployment. Should you automate all the way to deployment without a final, manual approval step?
• Who should build pipelines and how can you trust the quality of your pipelines?
• How much trust can you place on dependencies? You can’t check everything so where is the line of trust?
• Imperative vs. declarative workflows. Reusability of each for different use cases? Using building blocks that encapsulate imperative actions for building declarative pipelines
• Creating large blocks of workflows, with conditionals embedded in them, vs. small and containable blocks
• Using mono-repositories vs. dedicated repositories for microservices or for different parts of your pipelines
• Working on the production main branch vs. several feature branches
• Amount of time spent on review processes like merging on a branch or merging on a pull request?
• Managing changes to non-code assets like database schemas? Should they have separate pipelines? Backward compatibility and rollback considerations.
• What are the merits and practicality of GitOps and using version control to drive operations?