Pipeline

The ordered stages a change passes through between a push and production — typically install, build, test, lint, security scan, quality gate, deploy — each one able to stop the change

A pipeline is a promise about order and about stopping. Order, because a migration that runs before the code that needs it is a different outage than one that runs after. Stopping, because a stage that reports a problem and lets the change continue is not a stage, it is a log line. Bitbucket calls them Pipelines, GitHub calls them workflows, Azure DevOps calls them pipelines again — the shape is the same.

In a shell, a chain of commands joined by |, each one’s output feeding the next one’s input

Worth naming separately because it shares the word and breaks the same instinct. cmd | tail exits with tail’s status, not cmd’s — so a failing build read through a pipe reports success. Redirect to a file and read the status directly, or the pipeline you built to watch the pipeline will lie to you about it.