[falsedan]

> each repo is free to use whatever CI & deployment tooling it needs, with absolutely no constraints based on whatever CI or deployment tool another chunk of code in some other repo uses.

Hear, hear. Let teams choose the processes and tools that work best for them. In previous release engineering positions, I resisted the many attempts to instroduce a single standard workflow for all projects. The support burden of letting a thousand flowers bloom was not great, but the benefit was that devs understood their project and were empoiwered to make changes when the business requirements changed faster than standardized tooling could.

We had a few contracts for standard behaviours, but they were low-overhead: must respond to 'make/make test', have a /status endpoint that 500'd when it was unhealthy, register a port in the service conf repo, etc.