> Once you have a working pipeline in place, you can focus on the features, that's the whole point of the exercise: enabling developers to ship features for users. If I have to SSH into some machine and restart a set of services manually in the correct order, it will keep me from releasing features.
A "working pipeline" is an abstraction. Your actual pipeline will still sometimes break or misbehave in unpredictable ways, except now it takes a lot more context to debug and resolve those issues. Which is fine if you have dedicated infrastructure teams working behind the scenes to keep all that stuff stable (Heroku is an entire company that does this) but it's no silver bullet.
If you have to SSH into some machine and restart services whenever you release a feature, you will learn how to do that. And in that process, you will have a better idea how to fix it if it breaks and how to design features in an operationally stable way. If you just push to master and let the Machine take it from there, you're living in willful ignorance and are helpless when the Machine inevitably breaks down. And, in the long run, that will have a much greater impact on your feature velocity.
A "working pipeline" is an abstraction. Your actual pipeline will still sometimes break or misbehave in unpredictable ways, except now it takes a lot more context to debug and resolve those issues. Which is fine if you have dedicated infrastructure teams working behind the scenes to keep all that stuff stable (Heroku is an entire company that does this) but it's no silver bullet.
If you have to SSH into some machine and restart services whenever you release a feature, you will learn how to do that. And in that process, you will have a better idea how to fix it if it breaks and how to design features in an operationally stable way. If you just push to master and let the Machine take it from there, you're living in willful ignorance and are helpless when the Machine inevitably breaks down. And, in the long run, that will have a much greater impact on your feature velocity.