Getting Started

Introduction

Pipelines is a continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) service offered by Catalyst that helps to streamline and automate your software development and deployment process. With Catalyst Pipelines, you can efficiently build, test, and deploy applications across various platforms and cloud environments. By providing scalable infrastructure, along with seamless integration with popular version control systems and other Catalyst services, the Pipelines service empowers development teams to deliver high-quality software faster, with reduced manual intervention and improved collaboration.

Before delving into specifics, let us begin by exploring the general concepts of CI/CD.

Continuous Integration

Continuous Integration (CI) is a software development practice where any updates to the source code repository trigger an automated build process. This process produces deployable release artifacts that progress through the continuous delivery pipeline and are deployed to the designated environments.

The key features of Continuous Integration include:

Version Control Integration

CI seamlessly integrates with version control systems like GitHub, GitLab, and Bitbucket. The source code repository is continuously monitored; whenever commits are pushed to the integrated system, the pipeline automatically initiates the compilation, build, and test processes. This ensures that the latest version of the application is always available.

Automated Builds and Testing

CI systems support concurrent builds, which reduces build waiting times and accelerates the overall development process. By running builds in parallel and testing them simultaneously, feedback on multiple code changes is provided more quickly, enhancing productivity and allowing developers to address issues sooner. After the build process, CI systems can automatically run a suite of tests on the new code to identify any issues or regressions.

Instant Feedback

Continuous Integration aims to provide swift feedback on code changes, empowering teams to rectify issues early in the development cycle. This process enhances software quality, minimizes risks, and facilitates faster delivery of new features.

Continuous Delivery

Continuous Delivery builds upon the Continuous Integration (CI) process by taking the deployable release artifacts and automatically deploying them to selected environments. This software engineering approach emphasizes automating the software delivery pipeline, ensuring rapid deployments with minimal manual intervention.

The key features of Continuous Delivery include:

Automated Deployments & Environment Management

Continuous Delivery streamlines the deployment of code changes across various environments, including development, testing, staging, and production, ensuring consistent and reliable deployment procedures. It efficiently manages multiple environments with different configurations, allowing code changes to be deployed and tested in isolated environments before being pushed to production.

Incremental Updates & Faster Time to Market

CD enables the smooth delivery of small, incremental changes to production environments. By breaking updates into manageable segments, CD reduces the risks associated with large-scale deployments. This approach promotes quicker feedback loops, allowing for prompt identification and resolution of issues. Ultimately, Continuous Delivery accelerates the time to market for new features and enhancements, ensuring faster delivery of value to end-users.

CI/CD in Catalyst Pipelines

Catalyst Pipelines employs the CI/CD approach to automate the building, testing, and deployment of your applications to preferred environments. Whether you are developing web or mobile applications, you can effortlessly deploy them to any platform, including Catalyst AppSail, Amazon S3, Google Cloud Platform, Heroku, Microsoft Azure, Firebase, and more. Regardless of your programming language, Catalyst Pipelines supports seamless automation for application building and deployment. You can check out some common examples of deployment targets from this help page.

You can fully leverage the Catalyst ecosystem in the following ways:

• Deploy any application in Catalyst using the Catalyst AppSail service.
• Deploy Catalyst applications built with the Catalyst Serverless Functions component to the Catalyst cloud.

In both cases, you can seamlessly automate the entire process of building, testing, and deploying your application using the Catalyst Pipelines service.

You can create the pipeline directly from the Catalyst console. Catalyst Pipelines are executed based on the YAML-based declarative code defined in the catalyst-pipelines.yaml file, where you must define the execution flow of the pipeline. You can define the flow by adding necessary components using our built-in YAML code editor or visual builder according to your specific needs. You can check out this help page to learn more about the pipeline components. For more details on configuring the pipeline, refer to this help page.

You can choose to integrate your pipeline with any Git provider you prefer, such as GitHub, GitLab or Bitbucket, to automate the execution process. We will delve deep into this topic in this help page.

You can also implement our Pipeline SDK methods in Java, Node.js and Python in your application, to fetch the details of pipeline and execute a pipeline.

Let us first understand the key advantages of using a pipeline in the next section.