A pipeline is a workflow that orchestrates the delivery of snapshots across the stages/environments. While a deploy workflow defines the implementation for the delivery of a single build artifact into an environment, the pipeline operates at a higher level and orchestrates the propagation of many deployments across many stages/environments. The pipeline includes facilities for approvals, manual tasks, scheduling, deployments, and much more.
See Creating/Editing a Pipeline Version to manage pipeline details.
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A sample pipeline definition with three stages, see Example Pipeline for additional example. |
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The pipeline above has three stages, Development, QA, and Production. The Developmentstage does not have any gates, which means the steps begin execution immediately. The "Deploy All" step deploys all of the project versions in a snapshot into the Development environment, which utilizes the deploy workflows of the underlying projects to facilitate this work. The QAstage has three gates. The "Verify Functional Tests" gate verifies that tests for the projects in the snapshot in Development meet the configured qualifier metrics. If the qualifier metrics did not pass then the gate fails, otherwise, the gate completes and it transitions to the next gate. The "QA Approval" gate creates an approval task for the QA Manager group and blocks execution until approved. When the approval is given, the "Deploy All" step for QA is executed. Another test is also run and an email notification to sent to a QA group. When the notification is complete, the pipeline execution transitions to the Productionstage and executes its gates and steps (similar to QA). However, in the production stage, the approval is outsourced from an external Change Management System (i.e. ServiceNow CAB) instead of internally in the FlexDeploy application.
In a typical release, most of the snapshots will not make it very far through the pipeline. The approval gates are either rejected, or the snapshot is simply made "Out of Date" by a newer one. Depending on the size and complexity of a release, there may be dozens or even hundreds of iterations in the lower stages before the first snapshot is promoted to the later stages. In fact, it is possible that only one snapshot for the release ultimately makes its way all the way to production. At such time, the release may be ended, and a new one is created. However, if desired, the same release can be used to deliver additional fixes or updates.
Pipeline Gates
Gate Type | Description |
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Creates an approval task for the defined group, and blocks transition until the task is approved. If the task is rejected, the stage execution is marked as failed, and execution is terminated. | |
Creates an approval task tied to an external system (e.g. ServiceNow), and blocks transition until the task is approved. If the task is rejected, the stage execution is marked as failed, and execution is terminated. | |
Blocks transition until the defined schedule is reached, or overridden by a user with appropriate privileges. | |
Evaluates the test qualifiers for any tests which were executed for the same snapshot in the configured environment. The gate is successful if the qualifiers determine success, or fails otherwise. | |
Evaluates any scans that were executed within the current pipeline execution on build or in a previous environment in the pipeline. The gate is successful if the qualifiers determine success, or fails otherwise. | |
Executes custom groovy based implementation of gate. |
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