The DevOps culture aims to break down barriers between teams, while the pipeline unites all worlds: infrastructure, development, automation.
Because all teams want to deliver with quality and metrics and because it would be possible to collect how many rollouts were done, for example, in addition to a lot of other data.
Continuous Delivery (CD) is an essential part of the DevOps lifecycle. This ensures that software/application developers always create points for production.
In DevOps, continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI / CD) are achieved through the Jenkins Pipeline.
Using Jenkins Pipeline for CD allows the software to be delivered with faster and more frequent releases. This helps to incorporate comments into each subsequent release.
In this article, you will understand what is the DevOps pipeline and its main objectives for developing software for your IT teams.
Implementing a Pipeline: CI and CD
A CI/CD pipeline consists of a series of steps to be taken to make a new version of the software available. They are practices that aim to accelerate the availability of software. Also, they look for adopting the DevOps or Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) approach.
The CI/CD pipeline includes monitoring and automation to improve the application development process primarily in the integration and testing stages, but also in delivery and deployment. You can manually run each step of the CI/CD pipeline, but the real value of it lies in automation.
Elements of a CI/CD pipeline
The steps that make up a CI/CD pipeline are distinct subsets of tasks in what we call the pipeline stage. Typical stages of the pipeline are:
- Compilation: comply stage at which the application.
- Test: testing stage at which the code. Using automation at this stage saves time and effort.
- Release: send the stage in which the application is to the repository.
- Deployment: deploying the stage where the code is to the production environment.
- Validation and Compliance: determine steps to validate a version of the company’s needs.
In general, the organizational process for launching a product (or new functionality) on the market follows the following steps:
- Product vision: definition of product features
- Dev Team: performs development iteratively
- Operating area: implements and maintains stable environments
- Monitoring and feedback: generation of value and use by the customer Value Stream, from product conception to value creation, analyzes the complete value creation path and understands the exact value added in each part. In agile methods, there is no prescription for the delivery aspects, and therefore, the last mile is governed by best practices to cover the entire deployment process.
Feedback guides the company’s strategy, eliminating barriers between departments and enabling collaboration between people to generate value for the customer.
A deployment pipeline is an automated manifestation of your process for getting version control software into the hands of your users. The entire process can be modeled as a value stream map. It involves the processes of
- Integration
- Delivery
- Deployment
CI
These are practices that encourage developers to continuously integrate their work – a new source code (branch or trunk) to the main. It allows frequent adjustments to codes, quick deliveries, and fewer bugs. There are three things you need to be aware of before CI:
- Version control
- automated build
- team agreement
Some CI prerequisites:
- Frequent check-in
- Comprehensive Test Suite
- Keep the Build and Test process short
- Managing your development workspace
CD
It is an extension of CI to ensure that new modifications are available to implement in the production environment. In the testing and release process, automation contributes to quality control to provide quick feedback to developers.
Deploy to production is not automatic, but you can perform it at any time, depending on the acceptance of the change.
What is the Jenkins pipeline?
Jenkins Pipeline is a combination of tasks to deliver continuous software using Jenkins.
You make up the Jenkins pipeline of several states or stages and run in sequence, one after the other. JenkinsFile is a simple text file to build a pipeline as code in Jenkins. It contains Groovy Domain Specific Language (DSL) code that is easy to write.
You can run JenkinsFile separately or you can also run the pipeline code in the Jenkins web UI. There are two ways to create a pipeline using Jenkins.
- Declarative – a new way to build Jenkins Pipeline. Here, you write some nice code containing pipeline blocks, in an SCM (Source Code Management)
- Scripted – a nice way to write code, where you can define the code inside blocks of nodes.
Before entering the demo, if you have not installed Jenkins, please install it first. Make sure you install Jenkins and run it on your system.
Strategies for building CI and CD flows on Jenkins
Followed by checking the quality and style of the code, running the unit tests, building the package to check the integrity, and notifying the Git repository to update the Pull Request status.
And there is CD’s activation when there are changes in the branches corresponding to the environments (develop, master).
The implementation of the CI/CD implementation started the actions in the Git repository, starting with the creation of branches for all projects: develop, homolog, master.
Followed by the Mapping of the webhooks to trigger the Jobs on Jenkins, as it follows:
- Create/Update Pull Request → Launch CI Job
- On Change Branch (develop, homolog, master) → Launch CD Job
- Jenkins configuration for installing the necessary plugins for integration
And second, by creating Docker images and configuring them as agents within Jenkins.
Afterward, Jenkins files templates for CI / CD and language/technology, where each technology has different tools and scripts.
7 steps to develop workflow
You can create a workstream to track both CI and CD.
The CI WorkFlow’s development is in 7 steps:
- Check out the source and destination branch of the Pull Request;
- Checks if the merge has no conflicts that need manual resolution;
- Perform unit tests;
- Build the package to check the integrity and that the code is buildable;
- Triggers code quality validation via Sonar integration;
- Increments and commits the project version in the source branch;
- Notify Pull Request Git repository success or failure via Webhook, or Rest API call.
Is pipeline DevOps right for IT teams?
The benefits of an automated CI/CD pipeline range from practical considerations like code quality and quick bug fixes to ensuring you’re building the right thing for your users and improving your entire software development process.
While the name DevOps suggests a focus on development and operations teams, building a CI/CD pipeline provides an opportunity for collaboration across a wide range of roles. By optimizing your product launch steps, you give your team more insight into how you use your product to free up individuals’ time to focus on innovation.
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