CI/CD Anti-Patterns and Migration Strategies#

CI/CD pipelines accumulate technical debt faster than application code. Nobody refactors a Jenkinsfile. Nobody reviews pipeline YAML with the same rigor as production code. Over time, pipelines become slow, fragile, inconsistent, and actively hostile to developer productivity. Recognizing the anti-patterns is the first step. Migrating to better tooling is often the second.

Anti-Pattern: Snowflake Pipelines#

Every repository has a unique pipeline that someone wrote three years ago and nobody fully understands. Repository A uses Makefile targets, B uses bash scripts, C calls Python, and D has inline shell commands across 40 pipeline steps. There is no shared structure, no reusable components, and no way to make organization-wide changes.

Choosing a Deployment Platform for APIs and MVPs#

Picking a deployment platform early in a project matters more than most teams realize. The platform determines your cost floor, your scaling ceiling, your deployment workflow, and how much operational overhead you carry. Switching later is possible but never free – you are always migrating data, rewriting config, and updating DNS.

This guide compares four platforms that cover the most common deployment scenarios: Cloudflare (Workers + D1 + Pages), AWS (Lambda + API Gateway + RDS + S3), Vercel (Pro + serverless functions), and Fly.io (Apps + Postgres). Each has a genuine sweet spot. None is best for everything.

Cloud Migration Strategies#

A company does not “migrate to the cloud” – it migrates dozens or hundreds of applications, each with different characteristics, dependencies, and risk profiles. The 7 Rs framework provides vocabulary for per-workload decisions, but selecting the right R requires understanding the application, its dependencies, and the organization’s tolerance for change.

The 7 Rs#

Rehost (Lift and Shift)#

Move the application to cloud infrastructure with minimal changes. A VM on-premises becomes an EC2 instance. OS, application code, and configuration remain the same.

Cloud Vendor Product Matrix#

Choosing between cloud vendors requires mapping equivalent services across providers. AWS has 200+ services. Azure has 200+. GCP has 100+. Cloudflare has 20+ but they are tightly integrated and edge-native. This article maps the services that matter for most applications – compute, serverless, databases, storage, networking, and observability – across all four vendors with pricing, availability, and portability for each.

How to Use This Matrix#

Each section maps equivalent products across vendors, then provides:

Monolith to Microservices#

The decision to break a monolith into microservices is one of the most consequential architectural choices a team makes. Get it right and you unlock independent deployment, team autonomy, and targeted scaling. Get it wrong and you trade a manageable monolith for a distributed monolith – all the complexity of microservices with none of the benefits.

When to Stay with a Monolith#

Microservices are not an upgrade from monoliths. They are a different set of tradeoffs. A well-structured monolith is the right choice in many situations.

Planning and Executing Database Migrations#

Database migrations are the highest-risk routine operations most teams perform. A bad migration can cause downtime, data loss, or application errors that cascade across every service that touches the affected tables. This operational sequence walks through the assessment, planning, execution, and rollback of database migrations from simple column additions to full platform changes.

Phase 1 – Assessment#

Step 1: Classify the Migration#

Every migration falls into one of three categories, each with a different risk profile:

Pod Security Standards and Admission#

PodSecurityPolicy (PSP) was removed from Kubernetes in v1.25. Its replacement is Pod Security Admission (PSA), a built-in admission controller that enforces three predefined security profiles. PSA is simpler than PSP – no separate policy objects, no RBAC bindings to manage – but it is also less flexible. You apply security standards to namespaces via labels and the admission controller handles enforcement.

The Three Security Standards#

Kubernetes defines three Pod Security Standards, each progressively more restrictive: