Scaling Monorepos and CI/CD: How to Avoid a Tangle of YAML (and Burnout)

Oshri Cohen
Jun 18
4 min read

TL;DR

Treat your monorepo and CI/CD as a product.
Invest in platform teams and tooling (Bazel, Nx, etc.).
Design pipelines and release strategies are deliberately crafted to avoid simply copying and pasting.
Keep builds fast and feedback loops tight.
Pick merge strategies that avoid chaos.
Standardize builds so they work locally and in CI.
Regularly monitor and review the health of your platform.

Rolling out monorepos in your organization? Congratulations, you’re about to enter the wild world of complex CI/CD, build tooling debates, and release strategy “best practices” (read: tradeoffs). I often see this question arise: How do you develop a release strategy that scales with monorepos, and what does it actually look like when done well?

Here’s the truth: there are no silver bullets, but there are repeatable patterns and a few hard lessons that will save you a ton of time (and avoid an endless sprawl of Bash scripts and broken pipelines).

Let’s break down what the community has learned, what works, and where most teams get stuck.

Treat Your Monorepo and CI/CD as a Product, Not a Side Project

First things first, your monorepo’s build and release system is a product. If you slap together some pipelines and hope they’ll “work for now,” you’ll soon have a pile of YAML, Bash, and Groovy that nobody wants to touch. You need a team to own it, a deliberate design, and actual investment.

Red Corner’s Fractional CTO service is often called in after the fact, when the build system is so brittle that deploying even a hotfix feels like disarming a bomb. Treat CI/CD like the foundational platform it is. Assign responsibility, measure its effectiveness, and continually evolve it.

Developer Experience and Build Tools Matter (A Lot)

Monorepos aren’t just “big repositories.” They’re complex living systems. A monorepo’s success depends heavily on your build tooling and the developer experience:

Change detection: Only build what changed, or risk 30-minute builds for a typo.
Build harnesses: Use tools like Bazel or Nx for Node ecosystems. They scale better than vanilla scripts as your repo grows.
Manual triggers and debugging: Ensure you can manually rerun builds and debug issues. This will happen—a lot.

“Deliver a developer platform as a service. Pave roads for expanding services within the repo.” — Free wisdom

Fractional CTOs often lead platform teams or build out the initial platform-as-a-product mindset. They help teams make the right tooling decisions before the pain starts.

CI/CD Integration: How Tight is Too Tight?

You’ll hear two schools of thought:

CI/CD should be tightly integrated; this helps enforce consistent build, test, and release processes across all projects.
CI and CD are orthogonal: Keep CI focused on building and testing; let CD handle artifact promotion and deployment.

Both can work, but the key is deliberate design, informed by your company’s size, culture, and what you’re actually shipping. For most teams, building out templated processes that projects can plug into will save huge headaches later.

Red Corner’s approach? Help organizations model both CI and CD pipelines that match real-world delivery needs, never just copying someone else’s GitHub Actions template.

Speed and Feedback Loops: Don’t Let Your Pipelines Become Bottlenecks

One recurring theme: Build times matter. Nobody wants to wait 20 minutes to see if their commit worked. If you’re in games, FPGAs, or anything else where builds take hours, you’ll need a different strategy (like local builds or incremental pipelines). For web services, aim for sub-10-minute builds and fast incremental feedback.

A Fractional CTO can help here by introducing metrics, pipeline observability, and ruthless elimination of build steps that don’t add value.

Release Strategy and Merge Hygiene: Prevent the “Subway Map” of Branches

Merge strategies matter. You want linear history, but that can be hard when everyone is pushing to the same main branch. Some tips:

Merge queues or squash merges help linearize history, but may be expensive to set up.
Pipeline discipline: Quick reverts and clear ownership make all the difference.
Team communication: The healthiest teams have regular reviews of pipeline health and release status.

When things break, it should be obvious which team needs to fix it, and it should be easy to roll back without grinding the whole org to a halt. This is where strong technical leadership (hello, Fractional CTO!) shines, setting up team agreements and tooling that make these processes routine, not heroic.

Local-First Development and Standardization

Another smart principle: What works in CI should work locally. Standardize your language and tooling so that anyone can run the whole build, test, and release locally. This helps new hires, enables debugging, and reduces “it works on CI” mysteries.

Fractional CTOs bring this discipline and help teams set up onboarding guides, templates, and platform tooling so you don’t get stuck in local/CI drift.

Observability and Maintenance: Keep Your Platform Healthy

Set up pipeline observability to track flaky builds, bottlenecks, and overall health. Monthly reviews help catch drift early. “It’s easier to keep a healthy system healthy than to fix an unhealthy system.” If your CTO or technical leader doesn’t have a finger on the pulse of the build and release system, your team will pay the price later.

How Red Corner’s Fractional CTO Can Help

Most organizations only realize the complexity of monorepos and CI/CD when they’re knee-deep in failed builds and frustrated engineers. Red Corner’s Fractional CTO service can step in to architect a sustainable and scalable release strategy tailored to your product, team, and business goals. We’ll help you choose the right tooling, set up proper ownership, keep your platform healthy, and ensure your developers aren’t drowning in YAML.

Ready to get your monorepo and CI/CD under control? Let’s chat.