A good pipeline is boring: it builds, tests, publishes, and nobody thinks about it. This area covers designing CI/CD for small teams, building container images without a privileged daemon, and connecting pipelines to GitOps.
A Docker daemon in the pipeline means a privileged container with access to the host. There are tools that build images from the same Dockerfile without that cost; they differ in what they demand from the cluster.
A script executes steps. GitOps maintains state. That difference decides what happens when somebody changes something on the cluster by hand.
Twenty repositories and twenty copies of the same CI file, each slightly different. How to move the logic into one template and leave projects only what really sets them apart.