Your Deployment Pipeline Is a Privileged Identity System

We treat deployment pipelines like automation. They are not. They are identity systems. Every time a pipeline runs, it answers a critical question: Who is allowed to change production? And increasingly, the answer is: the pipeline. Not a human. Not an admin. Not a ticket approval. The pipeline identity. Not because we chose this architecture deliberately. Because we arrived here through a thousand small decisions that felt like operational improvements. The Shift We Didn't Fully Acknowledge Historically, humans logged into production. Engineers ran deployment scripts from jump boxes. Admins approved infrastructure changes through ticketing systems that everyone hated but at least understood. The trust model was explicit: this person, with these credentials, at this terminal, making this change. Now: a commit merges. A workflow triggers. Automation deploys. Infrastructure updates itself. Humans design the change. Pipelines execute it. That seems like a productivity win—and it is. But it