Drupal Acquia Azure CI/CD pipeline - Conclusion

This setup provides the ultimate balance of CI/CD virtues:

• Reliability: Your "Locked Box" Docker image ensures your build environment is consistent and portable.
• Speed: The "Factory & Assembly Line" model ensures your main pipeline is fast, running only the necessary steps. The gzip optimization shaves off even more time.
• Stability: The manual ci-net networking pattern is the only 100% stable way to handle Docker-in-Docker integration tests, eliminating flaky race condition errors.
• Best Practices: You are correctly using Branch Policies to manage PR validation, which is more secure and flexible than YAML-based PR triggers.

This pipeline is a robust, production-grade asset that will reliably test and deploy your Drupal application for a long time to come.