Ensuring Consistent Artifacts in CI/CD Pipelines: Best Practices with Docker

Artifacts may be a package, a binary file, or a Docker image.

The main purpose of a CI/CD pipeline is to verify that new features can be deployed to production; this happens gradually because each step in the pipeline essentially performs an additional check on the feature.

However, to make this example work you must ensure that the artifact tested in the pipeline is the same as the artifact deployed. In practice this means a feature/version should be packaged once and continuously deployed to all environments in the same way.

Unfortunately, many organizations fall into the common trap of using different artifacts in development, testing, and production because they have not mastered a universal infrastructure for configuration. This leads to slight differences between the version deployed and the version tested, and configuration drift or last‑minute changes become the biggest culprits of deployment failures.

Instead of creating multiple versions for each environment, the recognized practice is to have a single artifact that only changes configuration between environments. With the advent of containers and the ability to create self‑contained applications as Docker images, there is no reason not to follow this practice.

There are two approaches to handling configuration:

Embedding all configuration into the binary artifact/container and changing the active configuration at runtime (easy to start but not very flexible; not recommended).

Containers should have no configuration baked in; they obtain the required configuration at runtime via key/value databases, filesystem volumes, service discovery mechanisms, etc. (recommended).

The result is that the exact binary/package deployed to production is also the exact binary/package that was tested in the pipeline.

About Us

Zeyang, a DevOps practitioner, focuses on sharing enterprise‑level DevOps operations and development techniques, mainly new Linux operations technology and DevOps courses. With rich hands‑on experience, the courses emphasize practicality and have earned recognition from many learners. All course content originates from real enterprise applications, offering both technical learning and hot‑skill acquisition. Welcome! (WeChat ID: devopsvip)