Why CI/CD Matters

Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) is the backbone of modern software delivery. A well-designed pipeline catches bugs early, enforces code quality standards, and enables teams to ship changes to production multiple times per day with confidence. At Nexis Limited, every project — from our SaaS products to client applications — runs through automated CI/CD pipelines built with GitHub Actions.

Continuous Integration: The Foundation

CI ensures that every code change is automatically built, tested, and validated before it can be merged. The key principles are:

  • Commit frequently: Small, incremental changes are easier to test and review than large, sweeping pull requests.
  • Automate all tests: Unit tests, integration tests, and linting should run on every push. If it is not automated, it will not be run consistently.
  • Fail fast: Structure your pipeline so the quickest checks (linting, type checking) run first. Expensive integration tests run only if the fast checks pass.
  • Maintain a green main branch: The main branch should always be in a deployable state. Branch protection rules should prevent merging failing builds.

Continuous Deployment: From Merge to Production

CD automates the process of deploying validated code to production. The goal is to make deployment a non-event — routine, low-risk, and fully automated.

Pipeline Stages

  • Build: Compile code, build Docker images, generate static assets.
  • Test: Run the full test suite — unit, integration, and end-to-end.
  • Security scan: Check dependencies for known vulnerabilities and scan container images.
  • Deploy to staging: Deploy to a staging environment that mirrors production.
  • Smoke tests: Run a subset of critical tests against staging to verify deployment health.
  • Deploy to production: Roll out to production using blue-green or canary deployment strategies.

Docker in CI/CD

Docker containers ensure that the build and runtime environment is identical across development, CI, staging, and production. At Nexis Limited, we use multi-stage Dockerfiles to produce minimal production images — our Go services typically compile to images under 20 MB.

GitHub Actions: Our CI/CD Platform

We use GitHub Actions with self-hosted runners for our CI/CD pipelines. Self-hosted runners give us control over hardware resources, allow access to private networks, and reduce per-minute costs. Our ScaleRunnerGH open-source tool manages ephemeral, autoscaling runners with GPU awareness.

Monitoring and Rollback

Every deployment should be monitored for error rate increases, latency spikes, and resource consumption anomalies. If metrics breach predefined thresholds, the pipeline should automatically roll back to the previous version. We use Prometheus and Grafana for monitoring, with alerting configured to notify the team via Slack and Discord.

Conclusion

A robust CI/CD pipeline is not optional for professional software teams. It is the mechanism that turns code into value reliably and repeatedly. Invest in your pipeline early, and it will pay dividends throughout the life of your project.

Need help setting up CI/CD for your team? Contact our DevOps engineers for a consultation.