Pipeline Management

Overview

When implementing CI/CD, there are many discrete tasks that we end up performing, such as checking out the code from the source code repository, building it, retaining the binaries in a binary repository, performing a lot of checks and scans on the binaries, deploying these binaries on the target test environment, performing automated testing, etc. Though these actions are discrete, they should be performed in a proper sequence. The thread that binds these discrete activities together in a particular sequence is termed a pipeline. Depending on what activities are being performed by the pipeline, it could be a QA pipeline or a Production pipeline. Repeatability is the most obvious advantage of binding these actions in a pipeline, so that the same pipeline execution would indirectly execute the actions in the very same order without deviation.

A pipeline hence consists of a set of actions and also contains the sequence in which these actions should be executed. Thus, the ability to create and manage these pipelines is the most important parameter to be considered while selecting the CD tool.