Four objects: DeliveryPipeline, Target, Release, Rollout
A pipeline declares the environment sequence; a target is one environment; a release is one immutable snapshot; a rollout is one deploy attempt.
Speaker notes
- DeliveryPipeline declares the ordered sequence of environments a release moves through. Target declares one environment's connection details and promotion rules. Release is one immutable, versioned snapshot being promoted. Rollout is one specific attempt to deploy a Release to a Target.
- Point out that each Target in Meridian's pipeline reaches into a SEPARATE environment project via its own gke.cluster field — this is the tooling-project-deploys-across-boundaries pattern from earlier in the course, expressed as a real Cloud Deploy object.
- Name Skaffold's role underneath all four objects: Cloud Deploy delegates manifest rendering (skaffold render) and applying (skaffold apply) to Skaffold, which itself wraps Kustomize or Helm — this two-phase render/apply split is the same design as Terraform's plan/apply split, and it's what makes canary and approval mechanics inspectable before anything touches a live cluster.
Deck map
01
One pipeline, built deliberately
02
PCDE sections 1-2, and where this course sits in the track
03
ACE operates a resource; PCDE designs the system
04
One tooling project, not one pipeline per environment
05
Dev, staging, and prod should never share one policy
06
What actually crosses the project boundary: a token, never a key
07
A hand-run command leaves no record of why
08
Local Terraform state is a production incident waiting to happen
09
Cloud Foundation Toolkit and Fabric FAST: forked, never left unmodified
10
Terraform for foundations, Config Connector for workload-coupled infra
11
Git decides, automation reconciles — no human runs apply
12
Cloud Build's whole job: source in, tested artifact out
13
Built-in substitutions are automatic; user-defined ones need an underscore
14
An unfiltered branch trigger is a budget incident waiting to happen
15
Three repository modes, and scanning stops at the virtual layer
16
Cheap checks first, expensive checks last
17
Cloud Build produces; Cloud Deploy promotes — never the reverse
18
Four objects: DeliveryPipeline, Target, Release, Rollout
19
Canary limits exposure; blue/green makes the cutover atomic
20
A human gates production; automation gates everything else
21
Meridian's full path: merge to production, one continuous record
22
Credentials go in Secret Manager; configuration goes in Parameter Manager
23
An ENV baked into a Dockerfile is still build-time injection
24
One question resolves almost every config-placement decision
25
Ephemeral environments need a TTL, or they're not actually ephemeral
26
Rapid, Regular, Stable — and a maintenance exclusion set too late doesn't help
27
A compromised pipeline is every environment it deploys to
28
SLSA grades the pipeline's trustworthiness, not any single artifact
29
Default-deny, or an unlisted cluster accepts anything
30
Only /home survives a session — everything else is rebuilt fresh
31
Every chapter of this course, in one sequence
32
Readiness checklist