Delivery pipeline is the workflow, or process of how an artifact advances from the various stages in its lifecycle from development to production. Usually, the stages are as follows:
- Build
- QA tests
- Deploy on pre-production
- Deploy on production
On each stage, there can be multiple jobs (for example, for deploy on pre-production stage, there will be jobs like – copy the build artifact to pre-production servers, install the software, and run tests).
Readings
Jenkins
The most common CI tool. Below are useful plugins for delivery pipelines:
Delivery Pipeline – a plugin to visualize the delivery pipelines. Support manual steps as well.
Build Pipeline – another plugin to visualize delivery pipelines. Support manual steps as well.
GoCD
A CI integration and build tool, built with pipelines in mind from the ground up.