Shadow Pipeline

Sat, 24 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

In my recent post about CI/CD performance, I mentioned that I’d built a shadow pipeline in Ansible to deploy to our on-prem dev environment. Since then, I have been campaigning to use those Ansible playbooks for our pre-Prod and Prod deployments too.

I secured approvals to do a proof-of-concept deployment to pre-Prod using the Ansible playbooks but it failed dismally because our pre-Prod VMs have drastically different sudo restrictions than our dev env. I do not have access to the pre-Prod VMs so I was not aware of these differences.

The Cost of CI/CD Performance

Fri, 26 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

My current client has an enterprise CI/CD pipeline that is maintained by a centralized team that does not use it. Its product owner(s) do not rely on its output for their revenue. They are not measured on its performance or reliability.

And yet we are obligated to use this pipeline. There’s no other option. We were also handed a microservices architecture from the Architecture team so our application is comprised of about 20 separate services, each with their own deployment pipeline, thereby magifying our sensitivity to the whims of the enterprise CI/CD pipeline.

Pipeline on Craig Pardey

Shadow Pipeline

The Cost of CI/CD Performance