Every modern day successful project has one thing in common; A solid CI/CD pipeline. But that doesn’t mean they all use the same CI/CD pipeline, and in fact they probably shouldn’t. Sure you might use some of the same tools and modules, but plug and play almost never works between teams. The pipeline might be close, but something is always broken or isn’t quite right. Maybe not full on square peg in a round hole, but more like a pyramid peg that might fit one way but not the other.

“Things are going very well in my silo”

The Idea

This process is more common in established enterprises looking to move over to this DevOps thing. Even if they are doing things well, there will come a time when somebody will get the idea, “Things are going well in my team, I bet other teams would succeed using my same, exact process.” Or somebody in leadership is asking for a “One Size Fits All” model for this pipeline. The problem is they’re working in a silo, and they probably don’t know what the other teams are doing. Best case scenario, every team can reuse your same CI/CD process by changing some variables. Worst case scenario, you end up breaking your own process trying to shoehorn everybody else in it too.

So how do you get around this? Everybody staying in their own silos will limit the overall progress of a team as a whole. Well the first thing you need to do is learn what other teams are doing. Communication is key in DevOps Culture, and this should be an easy step. Opening up lines of communication between teams to safely talk about, and even demo, their CI/CD process. When you start these conversations you should see some similar steps and processes in place. Finding this common ground should be step one. This will be your focus on reuse; Building your Minimum Viable Product(MVP)