Continuous Integration and Deployment (CI/CD) pipelines automate the software delivery lifecycle, making integration of changes easier, releases more consistent, and speeding up feedback from the stakeholders. This ultimately makes CI/CD pipelines an important element of modern software development. While reliability has been shown to limit the applicability and trustworthiness of CI/CD pipelines, existing works have not studied it in detail, focusing instead on generic best practices or other qualities such as speed. To address this gap, we analyze 32 grey literature sources that explore practitioners' views and present 7 patterns that improve the reliability of CI/CD pipelines. The patterns deal with, among other things, reducing inconsistencies across pipeline runs, reducing sources of failures such as downloading and installing dependencies, and putting in place explicit resource and concurrency checks. Then, we analyze mature open-source repositories to identify evidence of the application of our patterns. Our findings indicate a strong contrast in the presence of these patterns. Atomicity and idempotency are often applied by developers, while parity between environments and pinning dependency versions are not.

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