Hard to say without knowing /what/ you want to accomplish in your CI process, so maybe some open source examples will help: * A "complex" library (node-resque)

Hard to say without knowing /what/ you want to accomplish in your CI process, so maybe some open source examples will help: * A "complex" library (node-resque). In CI (CircleCI) we install deps, compile Typescript to JS, test on 3 versions of node, and build docs. 4 min w/ some parallelization https://app.circleci.com/pipelines/github/actionhero/node-resque/959/workflows/c982294e-3cb2-4fa6-a200-1853c291004d https://app.circleci.com/pipelines/github/actionhero/node-re... * A web server framework (actionhero): In CI(Github Actions) we install deps, compile Typescript to JS, test on 3 versions of node, and build docs. 7 min w/ some parallelization https://github.com/actionhero/actionhero/actions/runs/801273572 https://github.com/actionhero/actionhero/actions/runs/801273... * A Monorepo (Grouparoo): In CI (CircleCI) we install deps, compile Typescript to JS, run migrations, check licenses, test UIs, CLI tools, Plugins, and try out a few different databases. 5 minutes with rather extreme parallelization https://app.circleci.com/pipelines/github/grouparoo/grouparoo/8417/workflows/dd8f7c8c-41b1-4aa3-a62c-ea283212f8bc https://app.circleci.com/pipelines/github/grouparoo/grouparo... In my experience, the biggest wins in CI speed improvements come from parallelization. You can parallelize by either running multiple processes/containers or by running tests in parallel on the same container (jest, parallel_tests, etc)