Release management with Pega Platform
Organizations recognize the financial benefit of releasing application features to end users and customers faster than their competitors. Many have adopted a DevOps approach to streamline their software delivery life cycle. DevOps is a collaborative effort between development, quality, and operations staff to deliver high-quality software to end users in an automated, agile way. By continuously delivering new application features to end users, organizations can gain a competitive advantage in the market.
DevOps
DevOps is a set of practices that bridge application development and operational behavior to reduce time to market without compromising on quality and operational effectiveness. It allows application developers and business owners to respond to customer needs quickly, develop a quicker feedback cycle, and ultimately achieve business value faster.
DevOps methodology drives innovation and operates on three components: people, process, technology. Use DevOps practices such as continuous integration and continuous delivery to quickly move application changes from development through testing to deployment on your production system. Use Pega Platform™ tools and common third-party tools to implement DevOps.
In the following image, click the + icons to learn more about the three components.
Continuous integration and delivery
A continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline is an automated process to quickly move applications from development through testing to deployment.
In the following image, click the + icons to learn how a continuous loop presents the development team with feedback on testing results at each stage in the pipeline.
Continuous integration
With continuous integration, application developers frequently check in changes to the source environment and use an automated build process to verify these changes automatically. You should add 'ready to share' and 'integrate changes' steps as part of your pipeline to ensure that all the necessary critical tests are run before integrating and publishing changes to a development repository.
Continuous delivery
With continuous delivery, application changes run through rigorous automated regression testing. The changes are deployed to a staging environment for further testing to ensure that the application is ready to deploy on the production system.
In a 'ready to accept' step, testing runs to ensure that the acceptance criteria are met. A 'ready to deploy' step verifies all the necessary performance, scale, and compatibility tests that are necessary to ensure that the application is ready for deployment. The deploy step validates in a preproduction environment, deploys to production, and runs post-deployment tests with the potential to roll back as needed.
The Pega CI/CD pipeline
The following image depicts the high-level overview of the Pega CI/CD pipeline. Different questions are asked during every stage of the pipeline. These questions fall into two categories:
- Developer-centric questions
- Customer-centric questions
In the following image, click the + icons to see the pipeline questions.
DevOps technology
The Pega Platform™ approach to DevOps is open to other solutions. You can start your DevOps journey by using the Deployment Manager and integrate third-party tools at a later time.
The Deployment Manager
For those looking to get started quickly, Pega Platform offers a pipeline manager, called the Deployment Manager. You must properly configure and integrate Deployment Manager with App Studio before you can publish changes. These integration steps enable communication between the candidate environments and the orchestrator for seamless publishing of deployment pipelines.
Note: To learn more about enabling Deployment Manager integration on the App Studio environment, see Configuring App Studio for publishing.
By using the Deployment Manager, you can set up each of your applications with a pipeline. This pipeline is used to move your application from environment to environment. When the Deployment Manager is integrated on the App Studio environment, the pipeline for a specific application is exposed through App Studio (Settings > Versions). Applications designers can publish their changes to higher environments, which eliminates the need for system administrators to promote or configure applications manually.
You can access the Deployment Manager in Admin Studio.
Use the Deployment Manager to configure and run continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) workflows for your Pega applications from within Pega Platform. You can create a standardized deployment process to deploy predictable, high-quality releases without using third-party tools. With the Deployment Manager, you can fully automate your CI/CD workflows, including branch merging, application package generation, artifact management, and package promotion to different stages in the workflow.
Note: For more information on the Deployment Manager, see Using Deployment Manager for model-driven DevOps.
Third-party tools
If you have an existing DevOps practice, you can integrate DevOps with third-party tools. Pega Platform includes support for open DevOps integration using popular third-party tools such as Jenkins and Microsoft Azure DevOps by providing an open platform with all the necessary hooks and services. With open DevOps integration, you can build a deployment pipeline by using third-party tools to automate branching.
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