CI/CD Pipeline Patterns That Actually Work in Production

After building and maintaining 50+ CI/CD pipelines across Azure DevOps and GitHub Actions, I've identified the patterns that scale and the anti-patterns that slowly destroy your team's velocity. Here's the playbook. The Anti-Patterns First Before the good stuff, recognize these traps: ❌ ANTI-PATTERN 1: Copy-paste pipelines → 50 services = 50 slightly different YAML files → One security fix = 50 PRs ❌ ANTI-PATTERN 2: No quality gates → "It compiles, ship it" → Production is your testing environment ❌ ANTI-PATTERN 3: Manual approvals everywhere → "Can someone approve my staging deploy?" → 3-hour wait because the approver is in a meeting ❌ ANTI-PATTERN 4: No artifact versioning → "Which build is in production?" → "I don't know, let me check the logs" ❌ ANTI-PATTERN 5: Secrets in pipeline YAML → "It's fine, the repo is private" → Narrator: It was not fine. Pattern 1: The Template Pipeline The single most impactful pattern. Write the pipeline once, consume it everywhere. Azure DevOps — Temp