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.

Understanding your ruleset and management processes

By using a DevOps process, you standardise your release process and make it repeatable and automated which reduces manual intervention and the chance of errors.

By using Pega Deployment Manager on your project, you can leverage the DevOps processes built into Pega and improve the stability of your development.

Deployment Manager is a simple, intuitive, and ready-to-use application that offers built-in DevOps capabilities to users. It allows you to build and run continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines in a model-driven manner.

You can run deployments involving your application updates with the click of a button, without the need for third-party automation services such as Jenkins or Bamboo. Fully automated pipelines help to significantly reduce the lead time to deliver value to end users.

Using a standardized way to deploy application changes with guardrail-related and testing-related best practices that are built into the out-of-the-box CI/CD models results in substantial operational efficiencies.

The steps below are usually carried out by the project’s Lead System Architect (LSA) as one of the first project tasks.

Configuring your DevOps deployment and defining your process

1. Configure your development environment as discussed in {Task 1003001} and {Task 1003002}. Additional information can also be found in Understanding best practices for DevOps-based development workflows.
2. Perform initial Deployment Manager configuration as outlined in Getting Started with Deployment Manager:
   1. Creating the DMAppAdmin and DMReleaseAdmin Operator IDs.
   2. Make sure your applications are built on PegaDevOpsFoundation.
   3. Set your branch development system setting, RMURL.
   4. Configure your Product rule.
3. Configure your pipeline by performing the steps outlined in Understanding best practices for using branches with Deployment Manager:
   1. Create a pipeline for your application and any applications that it is built on that you want to deploy.
   2. Lock your application with a password.
   3. Create your branches.
4. Ensure that your process is defined such that development happens in a branch and is only merged once the development is complete.
5. Set your notification preferences in Deployment Manager by using the Notification preferences menu option.
6. Configure Deployment Manager’s email functionality by using Email configuration option within the Settings menu.
7. Create a pipeline to take your development from Development to Production. Include manual quality review checkpoints where necessary. See Adding a pipeline on Pega Cloud Services for details.

Outcome

By configuring a DevOps pipeline as early in your development project as you can, you give yourself the best opportunity to ensure that you release complete, robust, tested, and high-quality working applications to your downstream environments.

You should not ever need to manually release product files or packages to your Test, Staging, or Production environments.

By ensuring that you release a PegaUnit smoke test application to at least one downstream environment, you give yourself a chance to catch any issues caused by or during the release as early as possible. The earlier any issues are caught means that the resolution is cheaper and easier.

Frequently asked questions about the DevOps deployment process

What if I need to fix a rule configuration something on Production – can I make a change directly there?

No – all changes must be done on Development and released to downstream environments using the Deployment Manager pipeline. This ensures the most robust and high-quality production system.