Pega strongly recommends that you implement a DevOps process to manage your development application lifecycle on Pega Cloud. A unified DevOps process with multiple environments, automated testing and quality gates helps identify issues earlier in the development process, increasing product quality and reducing time to market for new features.

Leveraging a DevOps pipeline ensures that changes are validated at each stage of the process, and are promoted to the next environment only after testing and approval.  

As a best practice, make all application changes in the development environment and promote them through the DevOps pipeline to ensure all changes make it back into to the baseline application.  Without a controlled DevOps process for migrating and validating changes, the different environments may get out of sync, leading to invalid results during the testing process.

To manage the DevOps process, Pega provides Deployment Manager as the standard way to test and deploy Pega applications.  Deployment Manager is a simple, ready-to-use application that offers built-in DevOps capabilities. It leverages the Pegasystems case management technology to manage an automated orchestration engine, enabling you to efficiently build and run your Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CICD) pipelines.

A standard Pega Cloud subscription includes these environments to support a DevOps pipeline using Deployment Manager:

• Development (“dev/test”)
• QA/Staging  (sometimes called ”pre-production” or “pre-prod”)
• Production

For more information, see:

• DevOps - A Pega Academy module that provides a high-level overview of the concepts, importance, and the implementation of DevOps practices.
• Deployment Manager for model-driven DevOps - Detailed information about using Deployment Manager to test and deploy Pega applications
• Managing update fixes with Deployment Manager - Detailed information about using Deployment Manager to stay current with the latest release of Pega Platform and applications
• DevOps - Information about using Open DevOps solutions