Robert Erez, principal engineer at Octopus Deploy and former Skype colleague of host Gergely Orosz, delivers 10 concrete observations on modern CI/CD in this episode of The Pragmatic Engineer. The sharpest: roll forward, never back. When a stateful system fails at v2, reverting to v1 leaves your code talking to a schema it no longer matches. Push v3 with the fix instead.
Three more findings worth noting. First, GitOps has nothing technically to do with Git. Its 4 pillars, declarative, versioned and immutable, pull-based, and continuously reconciled, do not require Git at all, yet the industry now force-feeds secrets into repos where they do not belong. Second, continuous deployment, shipping every commit to production, is overkill for most teams. Continuous delivery, where the pipeline is validated and a human decides the final push, is more practical. Third, feature toggles outperform rollbacks as a safety net because they do not touch the database schema.
The full episode covers Kubernetes, GitOps, platform engineering, progressive delivery, cloud development environments, and AI in CI/CD workflows. The tradeoff analysis between deployment approaches and the case for self-hosted software are where the conversation gets genuinely technical. Timestamps are at the bottom of the original page.
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