Delivery Pipeline Concept

Conceptual description of a Delivery Pipeline.

Includes patterns and best practices.

What Is a Delivery Pipeline

The goal of CI/CD is to enable a constant flow of software updates into production to quicken release cycles and reduce the risks associated with development.

A CI/CD pipeline achieves this by automating the steps between checking code into version control and releasing to production. It gives developers quick feedback on every stage with growing maturity of the artifact you want to deploy.

Overview

Stages

The pipeline consists of multiple stages. Stages are executed sequentially and depend on the previous stages successful completion. Each stage contains individual tasks (steps) which may run in parallel.

1. Build and Unit Tests

   This stage contains the classic application build as well as any checks on the code in isolation (unit testing, static code analysis).

2. Packaging

   In this stage the application is packaged for deployment and tested as a whole.

3. Automated Tests

   The application is deployed to a test environment and thoroughly inspected using automated tesing.

4. Manual Tests

   This optional stage is used to test borderline cases which can not accomplished with automated tests.

5. Release

   The Application is promoted to the production environment.

Each stage provides feedback to the developers in the form of logs and test reports. The scope of the test becomes wider / more integrated with every stage.

If a stage fails - ether through an unrecoverable error (e.g. build failure) or too many tests / checks failing - the pipeline is halted. Developers have to fix the problems in the source and start the pipeline from the start.

The pipeline can be triggered on commit, scheduled, or manually. Generally we want to push as many artifacts as far down the pipeline as possible. However, advanced tests are resource expensive so we have to make a trade-off. For example we could trigger staged 1 & 2 on every commit and 3 & 4 only on a weekly schedule or certain branches.

Additional

• Best Practices
• Glossary

Open Points

• monitoring integration
• pipeline status
• container security
• list technologies used in a container (baseimage and self installed)
• environment config
  • config itself
  • credentials

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