Last week we released the first version of Pipeline - a PaaS with end to end support for cloud native apps, from GitHub commit hooks deployed to the cloud in minutes to the use of a fully customizable CI/CD workflow. At the core of the Pipeline PaaS are its spotguides - a collection of workflow/pipeline steps defined in a .pipeline.yml file and a few Drone plugins. In this post we’d like to demystify spotguides and describe, step by step, how they work; the next post will be a tutorial on how to write a custom spotguide and its associated plugin.