CI/CD with Robert Erez
Get the Tech newsletter
Daily tech — startups, AI labs, chips, the launches that shape the next decade. Free.
- Robert Erez, principal engineer at Octopus Deploy, argues teams should "roll forward, never backwards" — because rolling back stateful systems (databases) can leave code talking to a mismatched schema, so a v2 failure should push straight to v3 with a fix.
- The episode challenges the GitOps label, noting none of its four pillars (declarative, versioned, pulled-not-pushed, continuously reconciled) actually require Git — yet the term pushed the industry to cram even secrets into repos dogmatically.
- Continuous delivery is more practical than continuous deployment for most teams, Erez says: you can validate the deployment pipeline itself without pushing every change to prod, deciding whether to ship automatically or click a button weekly.
- Feature toggles beat rollbacks as a safety net — flipping a flag "stops the bleeding" faster than a midnight redeploy, but teams must actively "weed" rolled-out flags or face a hygiene crisis.
- Git repos become a bottleneck at scale: companies running thousands of Kubernetes clusters pulling from one repo get throttled, proving pull-based GitOps doesn't scale infinitely for free.
- Banks, financial institutions, and governments will stay on-prem and won't move to cloud-based SaaS, Erez predicts, because they demand full control over hardware, upgrades, and downtime.
- AI is shifting CI/CD calculus from build speed to risk: once agents write most of the code, shaving 10 minutes off a build becomes irrelevant, and running extra — and slower — tests to catch agent-introduced bugs becomes the priority.
Why it matters: CI/CD orthodoxy is being rewritten for AI agents: rollbacks, Git-as-source-of-truth, and build-speed optimization all assume human developers at the keyboard. As agents write most of the code, the priority shifts to catching agent-introduced bugs via slower, more thorough tests — and persistent on-prem holdouts like banks and governments signal cloud-based CI/CD platforms won't capture the whole market.
