Netsensia Deployment Pipeline

Netsensia uses Concourse CI to deploy projects.

A deployment pipeline is a bunch of connected jobs that get code from development into a production environment using continuous integration and deployment.

A thumbnail shot of project pipeline is shown below.

The coloured boxes are jobs, the black boxes are resources. Jobs take resources as inputs and create resources as outputs.

Updated resources can, but don't have to, trigger other jobs. The visualisation shows the input and output resources of each job and which jobs, if any, a given resource triggers.

The Netsensia Pipeline Controller is a special pipeline consisting of one job which checks for changes to specified git repositories in order to trigger the first job in the pipeline. First, however, it checks each repository for changes to its pipeline configuration and, if it finds some, it updates the pipeline accordingly.

This avoids the two-step process of requiring a developer to initiate the pipeline and then push to GitHub.

It also provides some rules for creating pipelines, thereby encouraging consistency across projects.

The documentation in this Wiki also outlines various practices that can be followed to take advantage of some CredHub secrets provided by the controller, lessening the need for configuration and secret management in application pipelines.