Continuous Integration
Continuous Integration (CI) is a critical prerequisite of Continuous Delivery (CD).
Build and Package to Create a Release Package
To allow the execution of the build and package (CI) process on the DevOps Engineers machine, CDAF is used for both loose coupling and standardisation. CDAF provides a variety of features which provide consistency, especially important and the number of pipelines grow and the team members move between both squads and value streams.
Release Package Creation
With the focus being delivery, not development, the creation of a consistent, self contained release package is a core CDAF feature used for both component delivery and stand-up/tear-down capabilities. The output of the CDAF CI processs is a single release.ps1 file. See Self-extracting release article.
Property Translation
The transformation process converts the human readable .cm files into computer friendly properties file for use in the CD process, i.e. release.ps1. See Configuration Management, tokenisation and detokenisation documentation.
Execution Engine
The CDAF execution engine allows the DevOps Engineer to focus on the primary objective, and not have to cater for logging, exception and error handling. Within this engine are a set of operations for common problems, further allowing a focus on results and rewriting/copying scripts. See Execution Engine documentation.
Note: The following is details a subset of CDAF capabilities, describing a common usage, For a detailed breakdown of each component, see the CDAF Reference Documentation
sequenceDiagram
autonumber
participant entry point
participant buildPackage
participant buildProjects
participant execute
participant package
entry point ->>+ buildPackage: BUILDNUMBER
Note right of buildPackage: "Build" Process Begins
buildPackage ->> buildPackage: Property Translation (properties.cm)
loop for each Directory containering build.tsk
Note right of buildPackage: "Project" is a historical name
from Eclipse & Visual Studio
buildPackage ->>+ buildProjects: Project Name
buildProjects ->>+ Transform: Load Properties
Transform ->>- buildProjects: propertyList
buildProjects ->>+ execute: build.tsk
loop for each Line in build.tsk
Note right of execute: Build commands, such as
MSBuild, NPM, etc.
execute ->> execute: log, execute and manage errors
end
execute ->>- buildProjects: build artefacts
buildProjects ->>- buildPackage: build complete
end
Note right of buildPackage: "Package" Process Begins
buildPackage ->>+ package: proejctName
package ->>+ Transform: Load Properties
Transform ->>- package: propertyList
package ->>- buildPackage: project complete
buildPackage ->>+ packageLocal: prepare release
packageLocal ->> packageLocal: Gather CDAF SCripts
and deploy properties
packageLocal ->> packageLocal: Gather user defined artefacts
packageLocal ->>- buildPackage: artefacts
buildPackage ->> buildPackage: generate self-extract release
buildPackage ->>- entry point: release.ps1 or release.sh