Ran into the same thing as things grew, so I built a small release layer on top of CI https://orbnetes.cloud/try. It’s been really helpful for keeping control without overcomplicating the pipeline. Might be worth a try 👍

Agreed. Once CI just proves the build and CD owns release decisions, things like rollback and approvals become much easier to handle.

Yeah, that makes sense. One pipeline works early on, but once release decisions matter, it gets harder to reason about. Even making promotion and rollback explicit already helps a lot. What are you using for that in practice?

Totally agree! The “logical separation, same tooling” point is exactly what I’ve seen in most teams too. Where it starts to get interesting is when those stages begin to carry more responsibility (approvals, rollback, audit). Even if everything lives in one pipeline, the release side starts behaving like a system of its own. I ran into that enough times that I started experimenting with pulling the release layer out of CI entirely (I described it here recently https://tinyurl.com/techfacehashnodedev). Not a hard requirement, but it made things a lot clearer !

Shared more about it here: https://techface.hashnode.dev/ci-vs-cd-how-to-build-a-resilient-release-process?utm_source=hashnode&utm_medium=feed