Pattern: CI/CD as Platform
The CI/CD system is treated as a platform on top of the cloud platform.
An Enterprise company is developing Cloud Native CI/CD services during a transformation or cloud migration. CI/CD services include building of container images, code quality checks, security scans and deployment of artifacts to environments. CI/CD plays a significant part in compliance requirements and making sure production systems are secure.
In This Context
The complexity of software delivery in an enterprise company can easily reach a level when a dedicated team would have to be responsible for its maintenance.
CI/CD services on an Enterprise scale are difficult to implement. Taking into account requirements for auditing, compliance and team flexibility will lead to a system which is customized to a high degree. Often the responsibility for the these services end up with the Platform Team, which is managing infrastructure. While CI/CD is related to the infrastructure platform, it has it’s own goals and a different domain (in DDD terms).
Therefore
Create a dedicated product team, which will build and manage CI/CD services. This team will be a consumer of the infrastructure platform and a service provider towards development teams. The CI/CD Platform Team should treat CI/CD services as a product offered to all development teams.
This means feature requests should be phrased in a way that is useful to all users of the platform. All platform services should be self-service, CI/CD Platform Team members should only interact with application developers in limited ways (e.g. support) so they can focus on building functionality. Thus the team is an internal product team, not an enabler team.
Consequently
- CI/CD services are treated as first class citizens in the larger Cloud Native Platform
- Application teams can consume CI/CD services without waiting for actions from another team
- Specialist knowledge can be more easily built up and used in a team with fewer reponsibilities
- Development teams have to wait until features get prioritized in a product backlog.
- CI/CD Platform Team can’t solve Infrastructure Platform issues affecting them.
