[jrockway]

I don't think that depending on CI for deployments is the worst thing you can do. You get two good signals; 1) this compiled on my machine, and it compiles on some other random machine, so it's looking likely that this binary will start up on the prod servers ok. 2) there is some proof that the test suite passed before you ship your thing to production.

I'm really pretty OK with "if CI is down, and there's a prod emergency, and the test suite is broken", not everyone on the team can fix that. Escalate to someone who can, the 0.5 times this happens a year; the rest of the time, everyone clicks "merge" on their pull request and the code filters out into production quickly and efficiently. They don't want to think about it, but the customer gets their features as soon as possible. Not the worst thing. Way better than "our release person is on vacation, we'll restore your outage next week".