Skip to content

CI/CD Architecture & Deployment Strategies 🏛️

A comprehensive breakdown of pipeline infrastructure, execution nodes, and modern deployment strategies.

1. High-Level Pipeline Architecture

A CI/CD engine coordinates jobs between an Orchestrator (Control Plane) and distributed execution nodes (Runners/Agents).

+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
|                                 CI/CD ORCHESTRATOR                                |
|                        (Jenkins Master / GitHub Actions Service)                  |
|                                                                                   |
|  - Triggers (Webhooks, Git Push, Timers)                                          |
|  - Workflow Scheduler & DAG Engine                                                |
|  - Secrets & Environment Variable Management                                      |
+-----------------------------------+-----------------------------------------------+
                                    |
                                    | Dispatches Execution Jobs
                                    v
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
|                            EXECUTION AGENTS / RUNNERS                             |
|                                                                                   |
|  +------------------------+  +------------------------+  +---------------------+  |
|  | Ubuntu / Docker Runner |  | Windows Build Agent    |  | Kubernetes Runner   |  |
|  | - Compiles Code        |  | - Runs Tests           |  | - Deploys Artifacts |  |
|  +------------------------+  +------------------------+  +---------------------+  |
+-----------------------------------+-----------------------------------------------+
                                    |
                                    v
                        +-----------------------+
                        |  Artifact Repository  |
                        | (Docker Registry/S3)  |
                        +-----------------------+

2. Advanced Deployment Strategies

A. Blue-Green Deployment

Maintains two identical environments: - Blue: Currently running live production version. - Green: New version deployed and tested in isolation. - Traffic is switched instantly via Load Balancer once Green is verified.

B. Canary Deployment

  • Rolls out the new application version to a small subset of users (e.g., 5% of traffic).
  • Monitors error rates and performance metrics.
  • Automatically completes rollout to 100% if metrics are healthy, or rolls back instantly if errors spike.

C. Rolling Deployment

  • Updates instances sequentially across a cluster to ensure zero downtime without requiring double infrastructure.