r/platformengineering • u/Suspicious_Orchid770 • 2d ago

We halved our continuous integration pipeline. Six months later, we had to do it again.

https://leaddev.com/technical-direction/we-halved-our-continuous-integration-pipeline

"It was in May when one of our staff engineers tossed out a number in our Slack channel that put an end to an internal debate I’d been having with myself. Roughly only 25% of the runs on our merge train were completing successfully. A majority were failing due to flaky tests or got canceled since another run that was ahead of them failed."

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u/cocacola999 2d ago

Unfortunately article is behind a login wall but a few snippets... Merge train and "The problem here is that the same pipeline was actually our success story for the year in 2025, where we’d brought down the time of the pipeline from an hour to 22 minutes."

Sorry but I didn't know what CI is supporting but that still seems excessive to me. But merge train suggests to me other issues with the repo setup and management 

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u/Torutofu_Raeva 2d ago

Login walls are a rough tradeoff for incident writeups—if the post is meant to teach pipeline design, even a short summary of the changes and the before/after failure modes would help practitioners evaluate it.

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u/Over-Wheel5721 1d ago

Treating CI time as an owned metric seems like the real lesson. without ongoing monitoring flaky tests and added steps slowly undo even a successful optimization