5 Pain Points That Limit CI/CD Pipeline Success

Deciding which parts of a process should be automated, optimizing the implementation of individual pipelines, and equipping teams to get the maximum value from the system all require deliberate attention and commitment across your organization. In this article we'll look at five specific pain points which frequently hinder CI/CD adoption. Intentionally addressing these common pitfalls can make your processes more reliable and easier to control. ## 1. Pipelines That Are Too Slow CI/CD is supposed to streamline software development. Some of the biggest headaches are created by slow-running pipelines that block developers from completing their work. Having to wait for a long pipeline to execute after every code change creates friction and slows down the cycle. … ## 2. Resource Consumption and Cloud Costs Adopting CI/CD is advantageous to software delivery but it also brings significant resource requirements. Large teams with many projects may find pipelines are continually running as developers regularly commit new code during the day. This can quickly consume infrastructure capacity and lead to significant cloud provider costs. Using a managed CI/CD service such as GitHub Actions or GitLab CI can lessen this problem but you'll still need to pay for the job execution minutes that you use. Conversely, maintaining your own fleet of runners on self-managed hardware tasks you with ensuring there's sufficient capacity to keep pipelines running smoothly. … ## 3. Too Many Obstacles to Collaboration CI/CD implementations are most powerful when they're accepted as the single source of truth in your organization. That relies on everyone being able to collaborate to inspect running jobs, see what's deployed, and understand how pipelines define your workflow. You need clear methods of communication between different teams, such as Developers and Operations, and Project Managers and QA. Siloing pipelines off to particular individuals and working groups reduces their overall value. Allowing collaborative access means Project Managers can check whether a change has deployed by inspecting the pipeline history themselves, facilitating seamless information exchange between disciplines. Beyond automated tasks like testing and building code, your pipelines should also cater for manual parts of the process. Most CI systems include code ownership and approval features that let you automatically redirect changes between teams at appropriate review points. Having to go out of the platform to collaborate reduces efficiency and creates a risk of information being lost in transmission. … Using CD without due care and attention can create new hazards in your pipelines. CD needs to be protected by guard rails such as a well-rehearsed rollback strategy and comprehensive deployment monitoring that lets you identify what's currently released. Jumping straight into CD can create pain by increasing the risk associated with each pipeline run and necessitating more complex configuration. ## Summary CI/CD has the potential to transform software delivery processes by automating the repetitive aspects. ... Pipelines aren't without problems though: as we've seen in the five points above, a sub-optimal implementation can even end up hindering your workflow. It pays to anticipate these pitfalls early on so you can build mitigations that address them.