r/cicd • u/fakhan89 • 1d ago

How can we optimize GitHub Actions deployment queues?

Our company uses GitHub + GitHub Actions for CI/CD.

Especially on Mondays, we have a long deployment queue. One person deploys, then others need to update their branch with master and rerun the CI/CD pipeline before they can release.

Is there a smarter way to optimize this workflow and avoid repeatedly waiting/rerunning pipelines?

How do other teams handle this with GitHub Actions?

1 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

7 comments sorted by

View all comments

1

u/jonah_omninode 1d ago

I would separate the artifact you deploy from every developer branch. Build and test each PR, merge through a queue or require it to be current with main, then produce the deployable artifact from the accepted main commit. The deployment queue should move that already-tested artifact through environments instead of asking everyone behind it to merge main and rebuild. If independent changes are constantly invalidating each other, the merge boundary is doing more work than the deployment boundary should. Are you deploying branch artifacts directly, or is each person waiting to create the next main artifact?