Stop Using CI as Your Deployment Platform

Why build pipelines and release delivery should be separated — and how independent CD gives teams more control, resilience, and auditability For years, teams have treated CI platforms as the default place to do everything: build, test, package, deploy, promote, and sometimes even roll back. At first, it feels efficient. Your source code is already in GitHub or GitLab. Your pipeline definitions live next to your code. Your runners are already there. So why not push deployment and release orchestration into the same system too? Because convenience at the beginning often becomes coupling at scale. And once CI becomes your release platform, every operational weakness in that platform starts affecting not just your builds — but your ability to ship. GitHub Actions is included as part of GitHub’s platform and private repositories receive a limited monthly quota of GitHub-hosted minutes depending on plan; extra usage is billed. GitHub also documents that self-hosted runners still connect back