Cloud Manager CI/CD Pipelines intro-cicd
Learn about Cloud Manager’s CI/CD pipelines and how they can be used to efficiently deploy your code.
Introduction introduction
A CI/CD pipeline in Cloud Manager is a mechanism to build code from a source repository and deploy it to an environment. A pipeline can be triggered by an event, such as a pull request from a source code repository (that is, a code change), or on a regular schedule to match a release cadence.
To configure a pipeline, you must:
- Define the trigger that will start the pipeline.
- Define the parameters controlling the production deployment.
- Configure the performance test parameters.
Cloud Manager offers two types of pipelines:
Production Pipelines prod-pipeline
A production pipeline is a purpose-built pipeline that includes a series of orchestrated steps to deploy source code for production use. The steps include first building, packaging, testing, validating, and deploying into all staging environments. Therefore a production pipeline can only be added once a set of production and staging environments is created.
Non-Production Pipeline non-prod-pipeline
A non-production pipeline mainly serves to run code quality scans or to deploy source code to a development environment.
Code Sources code-sources
In addition to production and non-production, pipelines can be differentiated by the type of code they deploy.
- Full Stack Pipelines - Simultaneously deploy back-end and front-end code builds containing one or more AEM server applications along with HTTPD/Dispatcher configurations
- Config Pipelines - Configure and deploy traffic filter rules, including WAF rules, within minutes
- Front-End Pipelines - Deploy front-end code builds containing one or more client-side UI applications
- Web Tier Config Pipelines - Deploys HTTPD/Dispatcher configurations
These are described in detail later in this document.
Understanding CI-CD Pipelines in Cloud Manager understand-pipelines
The following table summarizes the pipelines available in Cloud Manager and their usages.
When front-end pipelines or web tier config pipelines have not yet been adopted.
Much faster than full-stack deployments
The following diagram illustrates Cloud Manager’s pipeline configurations with traditional, single front-end repository, or independent front-end repository setups.
Full-Stack Pipelines full-stack-pipeline
Full-stack pipelines deploy back-end code, front-end code, and web tier configurations to AEM runtime all at the same time.
- Back-End Code - Immutable content such as Java code, OSGi configurations, repoinit, and mutable content
- Front-End Code - Application UI resources such as JavaScript, CSS, fonts
- Web Tier Config - HTTPD/Dispatcher configurations
The full-stack pipeline represents an ‘uber’ pipeline, doing everything at once, while giving users the options to exclusively deploy their front-end code or Dispatcher configurations via the front-end pipeline and the web tier config pipelines respectively.
Full-stack pipelines package front-end code (JavaScript/CSS) as AEM client libraries.
Full-stack pipelines may deploy web tier configurations if a web tier config pipeline is not configured.
The following restrictions apply.
- A user must be logged with the Deployment Manager role to configure or run pipelines.
- At any time, there can only be one full-stack pipeline per environment.
In addition, be aware of how the full-stack pipeline behaves if you choose to introduce a web tier config pipeline.
- The full-stack pipeline for an environment will ignore the Dispatcher configuration if the corresponding web tier config pipeline exists.
- If the corresponding web tier config pipeline for the environment does not exist, the user can configure the full-stack pipeline include or ignore the Dispatcher configuration.
Full-stack pipelines can be code quality pipelines or deployment.
Configuring Full-Stack Pipelines configure-full-stack
To learn how to configure full-stack pipelines, see the following documents:
Config Pipelines config-deployment-pipeline
With a config pipeline you can configure and deploy traffic filter rules, including WAF rules, within minutes.
See Traffic Filter Rules including WAF Rules to learn how to manage the configurations in your repository so they are deployed properly.
Configuring Config Pipelines configure-config-deployment
To learn how to configure config pipelines, see the following documents:
Front-End Pipelines front-end
Front-end code is any code that is served as a static files. It is separate from UI code served by AEM and may include site themes, customer-defined SPAs, SPAs, and other solutions.
Front-end pipelines help your teams streamline your design and development process by enabling accelerated deployment of front-end code asynchronous of back-end development. This dedicated pipeline deploys JavaScript and CSS to the AEM distribution layer as a theme, resulting in a new theme version which may be referenced from pages delivered by AEM.
Front-end pipelines can be code quality pipelines or deployment pipelines.
Before you Configure Front-End Pipelines before-start
Before you configure front-end pipelines, review the AEM Quick Site Creation Journey for an end-to-end guide through the easy-to-use AEM Quick Site Creation tool. This journey will help you streamline your front-end development and allow you to quickly customize your site with no back-end AEM knowledge.
Configure a Front-End Pipeline configure-front-end
To learn how to configure front-end pipelines, see the following:
Developing Sites with the Front-End Pipeline developing-with-front-end-pipeline
With front-end pipelines, more independence is given to front-end developers and the development process can be accelerated.
See Developing Sites with the Front-End Pipeline for how this process works along with some considerations to be aware of to get the full potential out of this process.
Web Tier Config Pipelines web-tier-config-pipelines
Web tier config pipelines enable exclusive deployment of HTTPD/Dispatcher configuration to the AEM runtime by decoupling it from other code changes. It a streamlined pipeline that provides users who want to only deploy dispatcher configuration changes, an accelerated means to do so in only a few minutes.
The following restrictions apply.
- You must be on AEM version
2021.12.6151.20211217T120950Zor newer to use web-tier config pipelines. - You must opt in to the flexible mode of the dispatcher tools to use web-tier config pipelines.
- A user must be logged with the Deployment Manager role to configure or run pipelines.
- At any time, there can only be one web tier config pipeline per environment.
- The user cannot configure a web tier config pipeline when its corresponding full-stack pipeline is running.
- The web tier structure must adhere to the flexible mode structure, as defined in the document Dispatcher in the Cloud.
In addition, be aware of how the full stack pipeline behaves when introducing a web tier pipeline.
- If a web tier config pipeline has not been configured for an environment, the user can make a selection while configuring its corresponding full-stack pipeline to include or ignore the Dispatcher configuration during execution and deployment.
- Once a web tier config pipeline has been configured for an environment, its corresponding full-stack pipeline (if one exists) will ignore the dispatcher configuration during execution and deployment.
- After a web tier config pipeline is deleted, its corresponding full-stack pipeline is reset to deploy Dispatcher configurations during its execution.
Web tier config pipelines can be of the type code quality or deployment.
Configuring Web Tier Pipelines configure-web-tier
To learn how to configure web tier pipelines, see the following documents:
Video Overview of Pipeline Types video
For a quick overview of pipeline types, view this short video.