This talk aims to show you some ideas on how to improve your CI pipelines. I assume that you already know what CI is, you chose one of many tools available on the market and wrote some kind of a CI setup for your project. Great! Now, let’s take it one step forward and see how we can make it even better.

I will talk mainly about improving the speed of your CI pipelines (which in many cases will correspond to also lowering costs if you use a paid service) through:

• Making more things run at the same time - parallelization
• Making things start faster - caching, smaller containers
• Making things finish faster - failing early, splitting tests, running CI conditionally, etc.

I will use Gitlab CI to show concrete examples, but I will also try to make this talk as generic as possible to make it useful for people using different CI tools.