Deploys take an hour
A manual sequence of SSH commands, file uploads and cache clears, performed slightly differently each time.
[ Servers & DevOps / CI/CD & GitHub Actions ]
Deploys should be boring, not brave.
If shipping requires a checklist, a spare hour and someone's nerve, you ship less often and each release carries more risk. A proper pipeline turns deployment into a merge, and rollback into one click.
Usually 1-2 weeks · Works with your existing stack · Fixed price
1-2 wkstypical delivery
1 clickto roll back
Anystack or host
Docsyour team can follow
[ Symptoms ]
Signs your pipeline is the problem.
Deployment friction is invisible on a roadmap and expensive everywhere else.
Only one person can ship
The deploy process lives in one engineer's head, so releases stop when they are away.
No rollback
When a release breaks production, the only option is to fix forward under pressure.
Tests run somewhere else
A test suite that exists but is not enforced, so broken code reaches main regularly.
Secrets in the repository
Production credentials committed to git because there was nowhere better to put them.
Staging is not like production
Different versions, different config, so passing on staging proves very little.
[ How it works ]
Wire it up, prove it, hand it over.
01 — Week 1
Design
Branching model, environments, what gates a merge, how secrets are stored and what rollback should look like for your stack. Agreed before any workflow is written.
02 — Week 1-2
Build
Workflows written into your repository: build, test, artefact, deploy to staging, promote to production, roll back. Reviewed as a normal pull request.
03 — Handover
Prove it
We deploy live, break something on purpose, and roll it back together so your team has done it once before they need to do it for real.
[ What actually changes ]
What the pipeline does.
Built with GitHub Actions by default. GitLab CI, Bitbucket Pipelines and self-hosted runners are all fine alternatives if that is where your code lives.
Build & test
- Automated test runs — on every pull request, with merge blocked when they fail.
- Linting and static analysis — style and obvious defects caught before human review.
- Dependency and vulnerability scanning — so known-bad packages are flagged at merge time.
- Build caching — tuned so the pipeline finishes fast enough that people wait for it.
- Preview environments — optional per-branch deployments for reviewing work in the browser.
Deploy & recover
- Staging then production — promotion between environments, with approval gates where you want them.
- Zero-downtime deploys — health-checked rollout so users never hit a half-deployed application.
- Database migrations — run as part of the deploy, in the right order, reversibly.
- One-command rollback — back to the previous known-good release without a manual restore.
- Secrets management — credentials out of the repository and injected at deploy time.
[ Example engagement ]
From a 50-minute manual release to a four-minute merge.
A team deploying by hand roughly once a fortnight, moved to automated pipelines with staging promotion and a tested rollback path.
Illustrative example of a typical engagement. Figures vary with the state of your systems and are not a guarantee of a specific outcome.
4 minaverage deploy time
12xmore releases per month
1click to roll back
0secrets left in git
[ Free · 45 minutes ]
Show me how you deploy today.
Walk me through your current release process and I will tell you what I would automate first, what it would cost, and what it would save you per month.
[ Pricing ]
Pricing that fits your budget.
Tell me the number you have to work with. I'll tell you honestly what's achievable within it — and if it isn't enough, I'll say so before we start rather than halfway through.
Fixed project price
Scope agreed in writing, price agreed in writing, before any work starts. No hourly creep and no invoice you haven't already approved.
Monthly retainer
For ongoing work — maintenance, monitoring, updates and small changes. Month to month, cancel whenever, no minimum term.
Hourly for small jobs
For a single bug or a short task where writing a full scope would cost more than simply doing the work.
Budget too tight for the whole thing? I'll often suggest doing the highest-value part first and the rest later, rather than doing all of it badly.
[ Questions ]
Common questions.
Does this work with our stack?
Yes. Pipelines are stack-agnostic — PHP, Node, Python, Go, static sites, containers or plain file deployments to a VPS. The steps change; the structure does not.
We have no tests. Is a pipeline still worth it?
Absolutely, and it is often the thing that makes writing tests worthwhile. Automated deploys with rollback deliver value immediately, and once the pipeline exists, adding a test gate later is trivial.
Will this increase our GitHub bill?
Public repositories get free minutes. Private ones include a monthly allowance that most small teams stay within. If your builds are heavy, a self-hosted runner is cheap and I can set that up instead.
Can you migrate our existing CI?
Yes. Moving from Jenkins, CircleCI, Travis or a hand-rolled script to GitHub Actions is common work, and I will keep the pipelines running in parallel until the new one is trusted.
What about deploying to AWS?
Fully supported — containers, serverless functions, static hosting or plain instances, using short-lived credentials rather than long-lived access keys stored as secrets.
[ Related services ]
Related engineering work.
Docker & ContainersContainerise an existing app so environments finally match.DevOps ConsultingDeployment, reliability and process for teams without a DevOps hire.AWS Server SetupProduction-ready VPC, compute, database and CI/CD from scratch.Server Setup & ConfigurationLinux servers built properly: web stack, TLS, backups, monitoring.Node.js DevelopmentAPIs, services and background workers that stay up.Laravel DevelopmentAPIs, dashboards and long-term maintenance of Laravel apps.
[ Let's talk ]
Tell me what you're building.
Describe it in a few lines and you'll get a straight answer on scope, cost and timeline — same working day, from the person who'd actually build it.