Architecting Your DevOps Pipeline for Automation at Scale

Above and beyond build-centric tests, tests that require application in its entirety, such as integration tests, soak tests, load tests, and regression tests, are natural fits. Modern testing approaches, such as Chaos Engineering, can extend to infrastructure levels as well. For example, imagine that your company is a https://globalcloudteam.com/ startup that only has a few engineering team members. As an architect, your responsibility is to create an elegant solution that improves every software delivery aspect. You need to come up with at least the minimum viable product pipeline that delivers the infrastructure aspect as well as the code deployment aspect.

This makes making changes to individual services easier without affecting the entire system and allows for faster development and deployment cycles. If you have a large test suite, it’s common practice to parallelize it to reduce the amount of time it https://globalcloudteam.com/a-gentle-introduction-to-ci-cd-pipeline/ takes to run it. However, it doesn’t make sense to run all the time-consuming UI tests if some essential unit or code quality tests have failed. In modern organizations, the CI/CD pipeline is the conduit to get the developer’s code into production.

CI/CD Pipeline Elements

For example, a satellite system comprises a manufactured orbital object, a terrestrial station, and a web farm that feeds the acquired data to end users. Some components may be released daily—perhaps the web farm functionality or satellite software. Other elements, like the hardware components, can only be done once every launch cycle. The Continuous Delivery Pipeline is a significant element of the Agile Product Delivery competency.

GitOps makes the dream of a DevOps culture a reality by enabling customers to build and integrate declarative CD pipelines directly into their application development platform. Not every application can be microservices-based and containerized, but they can become cloud-friendly, even if they’re not technically cloud-native. If the application is successfully built and passes all the tests, the packaged application can be deployed to a virtual machine or a container in a Kubernetes environment. In addition to the unit test, the pipeline runs additional end-to-end tests and other quality confirmations, and then publishes the result through a tool like SonarQube. If the build fails or succeeds, the pipeline should also notify the developer team about the result. One of the most approachable books written about the DevOps process isThe Phoenix Project by Gene Kim.

Get DevOpsCon news and updates!

We have a successful build for our project and all tests have been passed and now we would want to deploy in the staging environment. CI/CD pipeline can be configured to use settings relevant to this particular environment using Infrastructure as code and finally deploy. Data engineers split infrastructure resources into live and staging to create isolated areas where they can test ETL services and data pipelines before promoting them to production. Continuous Deployment takes the changes from the staging environment and deploys them to production. At that point, they’re verified and monitored to ensure they are working correctly.

continuous integration pipeline architecture

If they do not match, the deviation is noted, and error information is sent back to the development team for investigation and remediation. Integration testing ensures the build operates with other applications or services. The build stage may also include some basic testing for vulnerabilities, such as software composition analysis and static application security testing . Bugs can take weeks or months to fix in traditional software development, but the constant flow of a CI/CD pipeline makes it easier to address and fix bugs faster and with better confidence.

Version Control

We would want to ensure that every change in our code is version controlled, saved somewhere in the cloud and can be reverted if needed. To prevent downtime in production, the most recent successful build is normally deployed immediately if something is wrong with our new release or feature. GitLab also offers services, that means that another service container is started at the same time as the job container , job container can use that service during the build time. It is made sure that they are on the same network and that they can communicate with one another.

continuous integration pipeline architecture

The principal difference between delivery and deployment is that continuous deployment automatically deploys each validated build to production. By comparison, continuous delivery typically just stages the validated build for manual deployment or other human authorization. CD likewise relies heavily on tools and automation to take a build through advanced testing, including functional, user acceptance, configuration and load testing. These validate that the build meets requirements and is ready for use in a production environment. Again, small incremental iterations ensure that any problems revealed in testing are identified and remediated quickly and less expensively than traditional software development approaches.

Align the Current Workflow to the Continuous Delivery Pipeline

Free tutorials such as Kubernetes with Jenkins or Kubernetes with Azure DevOps can help you explore your options. Executing any required infrastructure steps automated as code to stand up or tear down cloud infrastructure. Once all tests pass, they push the commits to the single-source repository, or a version control system.

  • The tools employed for this depend on whether the development team is working in Java, .NET, C#, PHP or countless other development languages.
  • A CI/CD pipeline is a loop that yields countless iterative steps to a completed project — and each phase also offers a loop back to the beginning.
  • Validating on staging – Features ready for feedback get pulled into this step to be integrated with the rest of the system in a staging environment and then tested and validated.
  • However, with other SCMs and CI/CD platforms, you will need to perform additional steps to integrate the two systems.
  • As part of a software development cycle, the development team should have a flexible definition of a hotfix and an internal method for determining what meets the needs for a hotfix.

Continuous integration ultimately means that software teams are delivering updates faster than before. This shortens the feedback cycle between application updates and user feedback and ensures that software development teams can continuously cater to the desires of their user base. The Codefresh platform is a complete software supply chain to build, test, deliver, and manage software with integrations so teams can pick best-of-breed tools to support that supply chain. Monitoring applications in production is essential to enable fast rollback and bug fixes. The idea is to ensure your deployment strategy accommodates unexpected faults and operates smoothly despite the issues, minimizing the impact on end-users.

Ansible Tutorial – Learn To Write Ansible Playbooks

These are logical phases and can map to environmental milestones like test, staging, and production. For example, components and subsystems could be built, tested, and deployed in the test. Subsystems or systems could be assembled, tested, and deployed in staging. Subsystems or systems could be promoted to production as part of the production phase. CI/CD and other agile pipelines are ecosystems composed of tools tied together with processes and automation, with myriad alternate paths and steps for different products.

continuous integration pipeline architecture

Tags: