CI/CD Pipelines
Building, testing and shipping, without the pipeline owning you.
Guides to the systems that build and ship your code — GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Jenkins and Argo Workflows — covering runner architecture, short-lived credentials over stored secrets, and how much of the deployment step belongs in the pipeline at all.
8 articles in this series
- 0114 min
GitLab CI/CD to Kubernetes: The Agent, the Pipeline, and the Parts That Bite
The certificate-based cluster integration is gone. Deploying from GitLab to Kubernetes now means the agent — agentk in your cluster, KAS on the GitLab side, and a config file that has to live on the default branch. Here is the whole path, including the context-name format that silently breaks every first pipeline.
Read - 0211 min
Jenkins vs GitHub Actions: An Honest Comparison and a Migration Path
Actions is not a drop-in Jenkins replacement, and Jenkins is not legacy. One is a general-purpose automation server you operate; the other is a hosted event system wired to a repository. Here is where each genuinely wins, what a migration actually costs, and the four Jenkins jobs that should never move.
Read - 0313 min
Argo Workflows on Kubernetes: The Object Model, the Gotchas, and When to Use Airflow Instead
Argo Workflows shares a name with Argo CD and almost nothing else. It is a container-native DAG engine where every step is a pod — which is exactly why it is excellent for batch and ML pipelines and a poor fit for thousands of tiny tasks. Here is the object model, the double-nested steps syntax, and the artifact repository nobody mentions until it breaks.
Read - 0413 min
GitHub Actions CI/CD for EKS: OIDC, ECR, and Helm Deployments Without Static Credentials
Static AWS access keys in GitHub Secrets are a credential leak waiting to happen. OIDC federation lets GitHub Actions assume an IAM role directly — no long-lived credentials stored anywhere. Here's the complete pipeline from code push to EKS deployment.
Read - 0513 min
Actions Runner Controller: Self-Hosted GitHub Actions Runners on Kubernetes
GitHub-hosted runners work fine until you need private network access, larger compute, GPU jobs, or per-build costs that add up. ARC v2 runs ephemeral, auto-scaling GitHub Actions runners directly on your Kubernetes cluster — one runner pod per job, scale to zero between builds.
Read - 0616 min
GitHub Actions CI/CD for Kubernetes: End-to-End Pipeline Guide
A Kubernetes CI/CD pipeline has more moving parts than a traditional deploy: image build, vulnerability scan, image sign, Helm chart update, GitOps sync, and smoke test — all chained together with the right secrets, caching, and failure handling. Here's the complete pipeline.
Read - 0713 min
CI/CD Supply Chain Security: How Source Code Leaks Happen
When source code leaks through CI/CD infrastructure, it exposes the exact failure modes that supply chain security controls are designed to prevent. Here's what supply chain incidents reveal about CI/CD hygiene and how to apply those lessons to your own pipelines.
Read - 089 min
Choosing the Right CI/CD Pipeline for Microservices Architectures
Microservices double the complexity of your CI/CD. We compare Jenkins, GitLab CI, and GitHub Actions to help you pick the best tool for your distributed system.
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