AWS Infrastructure & DevOps Consultant | Helping SaaS Companies Scale with Infrastructure as Code.
There’s this persistent concern in the industry I've run across over my career: while it’s fine to automatically deploy to pre-production environments, production deployments should always be manual. I get it—many bright professionals who’ve been burned by bad deployments feel this way. I know how crucial stable infrastructure is—my sleep depends on it too. But here’s why you should deploy with CI/CD. Yes, even to production. 1. Practice Makes Perfect: Automation codifies your team’s collective knowledge, running consistent processes through all environments. This isn’t just for pre-production—it’s crucial for production too. The errors you come across in lower environments are fixed as you move up through the environments. 2. Reducing Human Errors: When you manually skip the CI/CD trigger, you risk missing critical steps. Have you ever forgotten to generate API documentation or update config files? CI/CD ensures nothing is overlooked. 3. Building Confidence: If you’re still concerned, consider starting with a dry-run job. It shows what changes would be made without actually deploying, giving you a confidence boost. You can also implement a manual approval step for production, where everything is prepared, but the final action requires your green light. The goal? To make full automation so reliable that you won’t need that manual approval. Run it this way until you’re confident your process works—then let CI/CD do what it’s designed to do: make deployments safer, more reliable, and stress-free.
Engineering Lead | Full-Stack, SaaS, CI/CD, Data in Motion, Agile
3moAgreed! Also blue/green deploys with some sanity checks go a very long way.