The CI/CD Pipeline Every Startup Needs (And Nothing More)

Your CI/CD pipeline should help you ship faster, not slower. Too many teams over-engineer their pipelines with dozens of stages, complex approval gates, and tools they don't need. Here's what actually matters.

The Essentials

Lint and type-check: Catch stupid mistakes instantly. ESLint + TypeScript strict mode. Takes 10 seconds. Test: Run your unit and integration tests. If you don't have tests, start with integration tests for your critical paths. Build: Compile, bundle, and create your deployable artifact. Deploy: Push to staging automatically on merge to main. Deploy to production with one click or one approval.

The Stack

GitHub Actions for CI. It's free for most teams and integrates natively. Docker for consistent builds. AWS CDK or Terraform for infrastructure. Vercel or Railway for simple apps. ECS or EKS for complex ones.

What You Don't Need Yet

Feature flags (use environment variables). Canary deployments (use blue-green). Multi-environment pipelines beyond staging + production. Separate security scanning tools (use GitHub's built-in ones). You can add all of these later when you actually need them.

The One Rule

If your pipeline takes more than 10 minutes, something is wrong. Parallelize tests. Cache dependencies. Use incremental builds. A fast pipeline is a pipeline developers actually use.