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Meena Nukala
Meena Nukala

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Stop Building "Perfect" CI/CD Pipelines (And What to Do Instead)

#devops #cicd #platformengineer #ai

The "Over-Engineered" Trap
We’ve all been there. You spend three weeks building a masterpiece of a Jenkinsfile or a GitHub Actions workflow. It has dynamic parallel stages, auto-scaling ephemeral runners, and a Slack bot that recites poetry when a build fails.
It’s beautiful. It’s also a maintenance nightmare.
As a Senior DevOps Engineer, I’ve realized that the "perfect" pipeline isn't the one with the most features; it’s the one that developers actually understand and don't try to bypass.

  1. The 10-Minute Rule If your pipeline takes longer than 10 minutes to reach a "deployable" state, your developers are already on YouTube or making coffee. Their context is gone.
    • The Fix: Move heavy security scans (SAST) and deep integration tests to a "Nightly" or "Post-Merge" job.
    • The Goal: Fast feedback loops > 100% test coverage on every single commit.
  2. Standardize via Templates, Not Copy-Paste If I see 50 different microservices with 50 slightly different .gitlab-ci.yml files, I see a scaling disaster.
    • Senior Move: Use Remote Templates or Reusable Workflows.
    • Why: When you need to update your Docker login logic or your Kubernetes deploy script, you do it in one place. Your developers should only provide the "metadata" (app name, port, team).
  3. Treat Infrastructure Like a Product, Not a Project The biggest mistake DevOps teams make is building infrastructure for developers instead of with them. > Quote: "If your developers need to open a Jira ticket to get an S3 bucket, you haven't built DevOps; you've just built a faster silo." > The Golden Path:
    • Self-service modules (Terraform/Pulumi).
    • Sensible defaults (Encryption on by default, tagging enforced).
    • Documentation that lives in the README, not a buried Confluence page. My "Hot Take" for 2026 Internal Developer Platforms (IDP) are the new Kubernetes. We are moving away from teaching every developer how to write YAML and moving toward "paved roads." If your dev has to care about the underlying node group, you’ve failed the abstraction test. 💬 Let’s Talk!
    • What’s the most over-engineered thing you’ve seen in a pipeline?
    • Do you prefer "Total Dev Freedom" or a "Paved Road" approach? Drop a comment below—I’m curious to see how your teams are handling the scale! #devops #cloudnative #platformengineering #productivity

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