Why we ditched our CI monolith

After migrating to composable pipelines, our deploy times dropped from forty minutes to under three.

For three years, every deploy passed through the same monolithic pipeline — a 2,400-line YAML file nobody fully understood. When it broke at two in the morning, the fix was always the same: revert and hope. By January 2024, this file had become the number one source of developer frustration across twelve engineering teams.

The migration nobody asked for

Our VP of engineering did not approve the rewrite because she read about composable CI in a newsletter. She did it because our weekly deploy cadence had quietly slipped to biweekly — teams shipped less because the pipeline made shipping painful. I spent two weeks mapping every stage and discovered that fourteen of twenty-three steps were either redundant or embarrassingly parallelizable.

"We did not need a new CI tool. We needed the courage to delete fourteen stages that existed only because nobody had questioned decisions made three years earlier." — Priya Nair, VP of Engineering