Kubernetes Delivery Pipeline: Build, Verify, Release

A reliable delivery pipeline needs clear promotion gates between environments. Our flow used image immutability, deployment manifests with explicit versions, and policy checks before each promotion step.

Smoke tests ran immediately after rollout to verify basic service health and critical user journeys. Failed checks triggered automatic rollback rather than waiting for manual intervention.

The biggest improvement came from release visibility: every deployment linked commit, build, and rollout metadata in one place, making incident response significantly faster.