Scalable Multi-Application CI/CD Pipeline Management using Master Pipeline Architecture

Abstract

Modern organizations often host tens of development teams, each requiring its own continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline. Manual creation and maintenance of these pipelines lead to platform team bottlenecks, inconsistent security practices, and limited governance at scale. This paper presents a “pipelines of pipelines” architecture that uses a master pipeline to automatically discover Terraform based applications in a shared repository and provision standardized CI/CD infrastructure for each team. The system supports multiple source providers (GitHub, GitLab, AWS CodeCommit, and Amazon S3), integrates security and compliance scanning (Terraform Validate, TFLint, Checkov, and TFSec), and enforces centralized approval workflows and audit trails. The design shows how centrally governed, self‑service CI/CD can be achieved through automated discovery and templated provisioning rather than per‑team manual configuration.