How to expedite deployments

 To expedite deployments while maintaining control and governance in a CI/CD pipeline with manual approval gates, the following approaches can be considered:

1. Implement Approval Bots: These are automated tools that mimic human actions to facilitate approvals. By sending notifications and requests, bots can speed up the approval process and remove potential bottlenecks.

2. Implement Threshold-Based Automation: If certain approvals often follow similar decisions (e.g., green lights for minor changes), automate these approvals for quicker deployment.

3. Process Segmentation and Parallelization: If stages can be divided, automate each stage independently. This way, even if one stage needs manual approval, the pipeline can continue processing the other stages concurrently.

4. Automated Testing: Implement thorough automated testing to reduce the need for manual checks at later stages. This helps prevent issues that would otherwise require manual intervention, thus minimizing delays.

5. Implement Guard Rails: Introduce checks throughout the pipeline to ensure that only changes meeting required standards can proceed. This prevents faulty code or configuration mistakes from reaching the production stage.

6. Rollback Mechanisms: Ensure that the pipeline includes rollback mechanisms, making it easy and quick to revert changes if issues are discovered during deployment.