Introduction

Every change you make travels the same road before it reaches production. This module teaches you to read that road: the ordered gates a pipeline runs, why the green check on your pull request is the gate that actually matters, and how a built artifact becomes a running workload.

Two standards own this road, and one decision records why it is shaped the way it is. The CI/CD pipelines standard states the required shape of every delivery pipeline - the canonical stage set, which gate is mandatory, and the reusable-workflow model. The deployment-and-delivery standard governs the outer loop: how a signed artifact is promoted through environments. Both are governed by ADR 0017, the accepted DevOps delivery decision.

The pipeline is one machine-enforced flow

The pipeline standard is deliberately not a pile of independent checks. It ties the test/quality gate, the security/sign/SBOM gate, the release engine, and the request lifecycle into one ordered, machine-enforced flow. Each stage that proves something delegates the detail to the standard that owns it - the coverage thresholds live in testing-quality, the signing mechanics live in supply-chain - so the pipeline standard only mandates that the gate runs and blocks.

That is the reading skill this module builds. You will not memorise every threshold; you will learn the shape, know which gate is mandatory on every pull request, and be able to follow any stage to the standard that owns its numbers.

What you will get from this module

A working command of the canonical CI stage set and its mandatory floor, a clear answer to why CI, not the local hook, is the real gate, and enough of the deployment model to reason about how your signed change reaches production - one artifact, promoted forward, with a human holding the prod gate.