Configuring Production Pipelines

Learn how to use Cloud Manager to create and configure production pipelines to deploy your code. if you would first like a more conceptual overview of how pipelines work in Cloud Manager, please see the document CI/CD Pipelines.

Overview

Using the Pipeline Settings tile in Cloud Manager you can create two different types of pipelines.

• Production Pipelines - A production pipelines is a purpose-built pipeline made of a series of orchestrated steps to take source code from your git repository all the way into production.
• Non-Production Pipelines - A non-production pipeline primarily serves to run code-quality scans or to deploy source code into a development environment.

This document focuses on production pipelines. For details on how to configure non-production pipelines see the document Configuring Non-Production Pipelines.

The Deployment Manager role is responsible for setting up the pipeline. Pipeline configuration consists of:

1. Defining the trigger that will start the pipeline.
2. Defining the parameters controlling the production deployment.
3. Configuring the performance test parameters.

Video Tutorial

This video provides an overview of the pipeline creation process, which is detailed in this document.

Adding a New Production Pipeline

Once you have used the Cloud Manager UI to set up your program and have at least one environment, you are ready to add a production pipeline.

1. Log into Cloud Manager at my.cloudmanager.adobe.com and select the appropriate organization and program.

2. Navigate to the Pipelines card from the Program Overview page and click on +Add and select Add Production Pipeline.

   

3. The Add Production Pipeline dialog box opens to the Configuration tab where a number of options for your pipeline must be defined. These options are grouped into collapsible sections and are described in the following steps.

   1. Provide a descriptive name for your pipeline in the Pipeline Name field.

   2. Under the Source Code section, you define where the pipeline retrieves the code it will process.

      • Repository - This option defines from which git repo the pipeline should retrieve the code.
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      See the document Program Setup to learn how to add and manage repositories in Cloud Manager.

      • Git Branch - This option defines from which branch in the selected the pipeline should retrieve the code.
      • Code Location - This option defines the path in the branch of the selected repo from which the pipeline should retrieve the code.

      

   3. Under the Environments section, you define what triggers a deployment and how it should be rolled out per environment.

      1. In the STAGE section, you can define how the pipeline rolls out to your staging environment.

         • Deployment Trigger - You have the following options to define the deployment triggers to start the pipeline.

           • Manual - Use this option to manually start the pipeline using the Cloud Manager UI.
           • On Git Changes - This options starts the CI/CD pipeline whenever commits are added to the configured git branch. With this option, you can still start the pipeline manually as required.

         • Important Metric Failures Behavior - During pipeline setup or edit, the Deployment Manager has the option of defining the behavior of the pipeline when an important failure is encountered in any of the quality gates. The available options are:

           • Ask every time - This is the default setting and requires manual intervention on any important failure.
           • Fail Immediately - If selected, the pipeline will be cancelled whenever an important failure occurs. This is essentially emulating a user manually rejecting each failure.
           • Continue Immediately - If selected, the pipeline will proceed automatically whenever an important failure occurs. This is essentially emulating a user manually approving each failure.

         

         • Deployment Options - You can accelerate certain deployment tasks.

           • Approve after Stage Deployment - This approval occurs after deployment to the staging environment before any testing is done. Otherwise approval occurs before the production deployment, which is done after all testing is complete.

           • Skip Load Balancer changes - Load balancer changes are not made.

         

         • Dispatcher Configuration - The Deployment Manager role can configure a set of content paths which will either be invalidated or flushed from the AEM Dispatcher cache when a pipeline is run. These cache actions will be performed as part of the deployment pipeline step, just after any content packages are deployed. These settings use standard AEM Dispatcher behavior. To configure:

           1. Under PATH provide a content path.
           2. Under TYPE, select the action to be taken on that path.
           • Flush - Perform a cache invalidation, similar to when content is activated from an authoring instance to a publishing instance.
           • Invalidate - Performs a cache deletion.
           1. Click Add Path to add your specified path. You can add up to 100 paths per environment.

         

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         In general, the use of the invalidate action is preferable, but there may be cases where flushing is required, especially when using AEM HTML Client Libraries.

      2. In the PRODUCTION section, you can define how the pipeline rolls out to your production environment.

         • Deployment Options - You can define the parameters controlling the production deployment.

           • Use Go Live Approval - A deployment must be manually approved by a user with the Business Owner, Project Manager, or Deployment Manager role via the Cloud Manager UI.
           • Scheduled - This option halts the pipeline before production deployment to allow it to be scheduled. If this option is selected, the pipeline will halt after deployment to the staging environment and prompt the user for the action to take.
             • Now - This option deploys to production immediately, effectively completing the pipeline.
             • Date - This option allows the user to schedule a time when the deployment should be completed.
             • Stop Execution - This option aborts deployment to production.
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           Please refer to the document Code Deployment, to learn how to set the deployment schedule or execute the pipeline immediately.

           • Use CSE Oversight - If this option is select, a CSE is engaged to actually start the deployment. When creating or editing a pipeline when this option is enabled, the Deployment Manager role has the following options.

             • Any CSE - This option allows any available CSE to start the deployment.
             • My CSE - This option allows only the specific CSE assigned to the customer to start the deployment. This also applies for the designated backup of the CSE if the assigned CSE is unavailable.

           

         • Dispatcher Configuration - Define the dispatcher configuration for your production environment. The options are the same as those for the staging environment.

4. Click on Continue to advance to the Stage Testing tab where you can configure AEM Sites and AEM Assets Performance Testing, depending on which products you have licensed.

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   Refer to the document Code Quality Testing for more details on the options available on the Stage Testing tab.

   1. Under the Sites Content Delivery/Distributed Load Weight section, you define how sites performance testing is configured based on the weighting of page requests between the three page sets, which can be enabled or disabled.

      • Popular Live Pages
      • Other Live Pages
      • New Pages

      

   2. Under the Assets Performance Testing Distribution section, you define the test distribution of images and PDFs as well as define your own test assets.

      • Images - Adjust the slider to adjust the test split between images and PDFs.

      • PDFs - Adjust the slider to adjust the test split between images and PDFs.

      • Define your own custom assets by uploading them.

        1. FORMAT - Choose whether your custom asset is a PDF of an image.
        2. FILENAME - Use the file browser button to select an image from your local machine.
        3. Add Test File - Click to upload your selected asset.

      

5. Click Save to complete adding your production pipeline.

The Next Steps

Once you have configured the pipeline, you need to deploy your code. Please see the document Code Deployment for more details.

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