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The 3 CI/CD Anti-Patterns I See in Every Organisation

· 2 min read
Saikoushik Gandikota
Saikoushik Gandikota
Senior Platform Engineer

I've helped build or fix CI/CD pipelines at 4 organisations across retail, insurance, and financial services. The technology changes — Jenkins, Azure DevOps, GitHub Actions — but the anti-patterns are always the same.

Anti-Pattern 1: The 45-Minute Pipeline​

The pipeline does EVERYTHING: lint, test, build, scan, package, deploy to dev, run integration tests, deploy to staging, run smoke tests, wait for approval, deploy to prod.

One pipeline. One run. 45 minutes if nothing fails.

The fix: Split it. Build pipeline and deploy pipeline are separate. Build once, promote the artifact. Each stage should be independently re-runnable. If the smoke tests fail in staging, you shouldn't need to rebuild from scratch.

Anti-Pattern 2: Secrets in the Pipeline Definition​

Environment variables with database passwords. AWS keys stored as pipeline variables. "Temporary" credentials that have been there for 2 years.

The fix: External secret management. Azure Key Vault, HashiCorp Vault, AWS Secrets Manager — pick one. The pipeline FETCHES secrets at runtime. No secrets in YAML files. No secrets in environment variables. Ever.

Anti-Pattern 3: The Snowflake Pipeline​

Team A uses a completely custom pipeline they built from scratch. Team B copied it and modified it. Team C built something entirely different. Now you have 15 pipelines, all slightly broken in different ways.

The fix: Pipeline templates. A shared library of reusable pipeline stages maintained by the platform team. Teams compose from templates, don't build from scratch.

# Instead of 200 lines of custom YAML
stages:
  - template: templates/build-dotnet.yml
  - template: templates/scan-container.yml
  - template: templates/deploy-aks.yml
    parameters:
      environment: production

The Meta-Pattern​

All three anti-patterns share a root cause: no one owns the CI/CD experience. When pipelines are each team's problem, every team solves it differently and usually incompletely.

A platform team that owns pipeline templates, enforces security standards, and optimises build times will save more engineering hours than almost any other investment.

Which CI/CD anti-pattern is most painful in your org? Let me know on LinkedIn.