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.

The release pipeline in the following diagram illustrates the best practices for using Pega Platform for DevOps. At each stage in the pipeline, a continuous loop presents the development team with feedback on testing results. This example includes the following assumptions:

• Pega Platform manages all schema changes.
• Jenkins is the automation server that helps to coordinate the release pipeline, and JFrog Artifactory is the application repository; however, other equivalent tools could be used for both.

• Understanding development

  Pega Platform developers use Agile practices to create applications and commit the changes into branches in a shared development environment. Automated and manual testing provides rapid feedback to developers so that they can improve the application.

• Understanding continuous integration

  With continuous integration, application developers frequently check in their changes to the source environment and use an automated build process to automatically verify these changes. Continuous integration identifies issues and pinpoints them early in the cycle. Use Jenkins with the prpcServiceUtils tool and the execute test service to automatically generate a potentially deployable application and export the application archive to a binary repository such as JFrog Artifactory.

• Understanding continuous delivery

  With continuous delivery, application changes run through rigorous automated regression testing and are deployed to a staging environment for further testing to ensure that there is a high confidence the application is ready to deploy on the production system.

• Understanding deployment

  After an application change passes the testing requirements, use Jenkins and the prpcServiceUtils tools to migrate the changes into production after complete validation through automated testing on the staging system. Use application release guidelines to deploy with minimal downtime.