Pipelines

Solution Designer provides a UI to configure the pipelines, which are used to build projects into components and either release this component or deploy it to the desired target. This configuration can be accessed from the CI/CD page which is located in the navigation bar on the left, when a project is open. On this page it is possible to create, edit and delete the pipeline configurations.

Available pipeline types

There are two general types of pipelines available:

Release pipeline

The Release pipeline will build the project from the configured Git repository and then publish the container image in the OpenShift Registry and the Helm chart in the configured Helm Repository.

Deploy pipeline

The Deploy pipeline will build the project from the configured Git repository and deploys it to its defined target project.

Available and installed tasks/definitions

During the installation of IBM Industry Solutions Workbench, the following pipeline task definitions are created in the namespace, where IBM Industry Solutions Workbench is getting installed.

Task definitions

A task is a collection of sequential steps, that will be executed during a pipeline run. Each task of a pipeline will run inside an own pod on the cluster.

Each step will be executed in an own container inside the pod. For example, if a pipeline consists of two tasks and the pipeline will be executed, OpenShift Pipelines will create two pods, one for each task.

The installation will create three pipeline tasks as Kubernetes resources inside your OpenShift project. These are used by the different types of pipelines and solutions.

  • k5-release-java

  • k5-release-node

  • k5-undeploy

The k5-release-java task is responsible for releasing and deploying Java stack service projects.

The k5-release-node task is responsible for releasing and deploying Node stack service projects.

The k5-undeploy task is responsible for un-deploying a service from the defined target project, if the service was deployed via Single Service Deployment. It does not clean Kafka or database resources.

General information

Creation, triggering and deletion of a new pipeline can be done in Solution Designer. The creation of a new pipeline will also trigger the first execution/run of the pipeline. All created pipelines can then be re-triggered in Solution Designer manually. Use the Run button in the CI/CD page in Solution Designer to start a release or a deployment of your project.

Attention: Please do not create, run or re-trigger a project's pipeline using the OpenShift Console ( Developer view -> Pipelines). Only the Solution Designer should be used for that.