unified-cicd-platformlisted

# One CI/CD Platform for Everything, or Pay the Tax Forever Running CircleCI for application builds, GitLab CI for infrastructure pipelines, and GitHub Actions for deployments is an operational tax that compounds daily. Every platform has different YAML syntax, different secrets management, different caching mechanisms, different debugging workflows, and different monitoring dashboards. Engineers carry three mental models instead of one. During incidents -- when context-switching costs are highest -- crossing platform boundaries wastes critical minutes. A deployment failed. Which platform ran it? Where are the logs? How do you re-trigger it? The answer changes depending on which system was responsible. This is not a theoretical concern. Teams that have lived through multi-platform CI/CD report the same pattern: initial adoption is easy (each tool does its job), but maintenance becomes a death spiral. Secret rotation requires updating three platforms. A new engineer must learn three systems. Pipeline debugging requires three browser tabs with three different log viewers. The consolidation from three providers to one is consistently described as one of the highest-impact operational improvements a team can make. ## The Cost of Multi-Platform CI/CD | Dimension | Single Platform | Multiple Platforms | |-----------|-----------------|-------------------| | Syntax to learn | One YAML dialect | 2-3 incompatible dialects | | Secrets management | One secrets store | Secrets duplica