Continuous Deployment Pipeline Details

Terminology

Deploying the Components

The pipeline is used to deploy the same build of a component (the Docker container) to the staging and production environments.

Figure 2: The pipeline for automatically deploying applications to staging

Figure 2: The pipeline for automatically deploying applications

Deploying to Staging

The deployment of all the components for a CESSDA application are controlled by a single Jenkinsfile in a repository called cessda.${app_name}.deploy, where ${app_name} is the name of the application as a short code. This repository stores the deployment configuration of the components in the form of Kubernetes manifests. These define the settings used by each component and, if necessary, secrets that hold credentials and other sensitive information.

A new deployment occurs every time code changes are pushed to any of the component source code repositories. This deployment occurs on the staging-cluster and is exposed at the development endpoint of the application.

A conditional stage in the Jenkinsfile will automatically start Selenium tests only when a new deployment occurs on the staging-cluster. This prevents infinite loops occurring when the tests finish and the production deployment completes. When the tests pass, the Docker images are deployed directly to the production-cluster.

stage('Run Selenium Tests') {
    steps {
        build job: 'cessda.${app_name}.test', wait: false
    }
    when {
        environment name: 'cluster', value: 'staging-cluster'
    }
}

Figure 3: The code that prevents the infinite loops. From cessda.${app_name}.deploy/Jenkinsfile.

Deploying to Production

Figure 4: The pipeline for deploying applications to production

Figure 4: The pipeline for deploying applications to production

Deploying to the production-cluster is initiated automatically once the tests in cessda.${app_name}.test pass. This is accomplished by having the cessda.${app_name}.test call the cessda.${app_name}.deploy job with the staging image tags and the cluster set to the production-cluster.