CI/CD Pipeline to multiple environments

Question

I am learning CI/CD concepts and trying to set up a pipe line in Azure to deploy my sample api to dev, int,qa and prod environments. I was able to deployment the build successfully to all environments. But what is the correct way of doing CI/CD in the companies? We cannot have build on every check-in to all environments even though we have the unit testing run in the build. The usual flow should be Unit test then deploy to Stage/QA and once QA signs off then we promote the build to PROD right? How does this fit into the CI/CD pipeline? Also we can have multiple builds in Dev, can we select which build to deploy to stg and prod?

Answer 1

The ideal way would be to link each of your check-ins to some bug/task so that it will be linked to appropriate test case .After the check in automated test cases are run simultaneously and test whether the check in is valid. If it is valid you can line it up to deployment which only will be deployed after getting the necessary approvals.It is recommended to run continuous integration pipeline to each check in so that you will have a history of build success and failures which is a big relief when you have to find/track errors.

To the prod environment you have multiple approvals as requirement to deploy and provide all the approvals when the sign off is provided.

For the build to map to stg and prod .yes you can do this .If you are using web app in azure and you have prod and stage slots then you can point the branch to respective slots in the deployment configuration.

Please let me know if you need anything else.

Hope this helps.