The Problem

Engineering teams at Basis were building and maintaining their own CI/CD pipelines independently. There was no standard. Pipelines varied in quality, lacked consistent artifact management, and created ongoing maintenance burden for each team.

The Solution

I designed and authored the company-wide CI/CD pipeline standard — a 14-stage pipeline that became the default for all engineering services.

The 14-stage pipeline includes:

  1. Source checkout
  2. Dependency installation
  3. Static analysis / linting
  4. Unit tests
  5. Integration test trigger
  6. Docker multi-stage build
  7. Image tagging (semantic versioning)
  8. Security scanning
  9. Artifact registry push
  10. Staging deploy
  11. Smoke tests
  12. Production deploy gate
  13. Production deploy
  14. Post-deploy verification

Three deployment modes:

  • Locked standard — teams inherit the full pipeline with no changes; zero maintenance overhead
  • Configurable — teams can toggle stages on/off via config; still managed centrally
  • Fully custom — teams own their pipeline; opt-in for services with unusual requirements

Results

  • Adopted across all engineering services
  • Eliminated per-team pipeline maintenance for teams on locked standard
  • Semantic versioning standardized across all artifacts
  • Docker multi-stage builds reduced image sizes and improved security posture
  • Legacy pipeline suite fully retired January 2025