Are your CI/CD pipelines accidentally increasing technical debt?

For most platform engineering teams, internal developer portals are considered the best way to solve DevOps scalability challenges. The ability to instantly spin up a new pipeline by cloning a template has been a game-changer for development teams. With just the push of a button, a developer can set up a new pipeline with all the workflows, toolchains, and resources they need to create a new application. It almost feels like magic.

But this Day 1 speed often comes with a major Day 2 problem: operational paralysis, also called the “scaffolding trap,” said Eric Minick, DevOps evangelist at Harness. Every time you clone a pipeline template, it inevitably drifts. You’re paying for Day 1 simplicity with Day 2 technical debt.

As your organization grows, “making an update across 100 services means managing 100 separate pull requests or convincing dozens of teams to make changes,” Minick said.

Why copying templates creates technical debt

If your Day 2 operations are creating chaos and you’re struggling to scale without adding more technical debt, join us on February 3 at 8:30am PT | 11:30am ET for a special online event, How To Architect a CI/CD Pipeline That Really Scales.

During this free webinar, Minick; Senior Director, Cloud Platform & Site Reliability at Choice Hotels, Stephen Cihak; and TNS Host Chris Pirillo will explore the scaffolding trap and explain why copying CI/CD templates creates technical debt and operational paralysis.

They’ll also share how Choice Hotels escaped the scaffolding trap by refactoring its pipeline strategy to focus on inheritance over copying, allowing it to update hundreds of workflows instantly and keep its developers happy.

Register for this free webinar today!

If you can’t join us live, register anyway and we’ll send you a recording following the webinar.

What you’ll learn

By attending this special online event, you’ll leave with best practices, real-world examples, and actionable tips including:

• Expose the “Scaffolding Trap”: Find out why optimizing for Day 1 speed often leads to operational paralysis during Day 2 maintenance.
• Explore Real-World Refactoring: Hear how Choice Hotels refactored its pipeline strategy to update hundreds of workflows instantly while supporting developer experience.
• Examine a Reuse Maturity Model: Learn a simple maturity model that makes it easy to assess your existing reuse architecture and identify where you want to go.

Register for this free webinar today!

The post Are your CI/CD pipelines accidentally increasing technical debt? appeared first on The New Stack.