Delivery infrastructure attracts two failure modes: teams that keep deploying by hand long past the point it is safe, and teams that adopt a platform designed for an organisation ten times their size.
A reasonable baseline
- Every merge to the main branch builds and tests automatically
- Deployment is a single reviewable action, not a sequence of manual steps
- Environments are created from code, so staging resembles production
- Secrets live in a managed store, never in the repository
- Rollback is documented and has been rehearsed at least once
- Alerts cover the failures that affect users, and reach a named person
What can wait
Multi-region deployment, service meshes, custom internal developer platforms and elaborate progressive-delivery tooling are rarely the constraint for a team of this size. They add operational surface that someone has to maintain while the actual bottleneck is a flaky test suite or a slow review cycle.
Measure the pipeline, not the tooling
Track how long a change takes from merge to production, how often a deployment fails, and how long recovery takes. Those numbers tell you where to invest far better than a comparison of platforms.
Ownership
Delivery infrastructure that no one owns degrades. Before adding a component, decide who maintains it and who is called when it fails at an inconvenient hour. If there is no answer, choose the simpler option.