Automation Pipelines models and supports your DevOps release lifecycle, and continuously tests and releases your applications to development environments and production environments.

You already set up everything you need so that you can use Automation Pipelines. See Setting up Automation Pipelines to model my release process.

Now, you can create pipelines that automate the build and test of developer code before you release it to production. You can have Automation Pipelines deploy container-based or traditional applications.

Table 1. Using Automation Pipelines in your DevOps lifecycle
Features Examples of what you can do
Use the native build capability in Automation Pipelines.

Create Continuous Integration and Delivery (CICD), Continuous Integration (CI), and Continuous Delivery (CD) pipelines that continuously integrate, containerize, and deliver your code.

  • Use a smart pipeline template that creates a pipeline for you.
  • Manually add stages and tasks to a pipeline.
Release your applications and automate releases.

Integrate and release your applications in various ways.

  • Continuously integrate your code from a GitHub or a GitLab repository into your pipeline.
  • Integrate a Docker Host to run Continuous Integration tasks as documented in this blog article about creating a Docker host.
  • Automate the deployment of your application by using a YAML cloud template.
  • Automate the deployment of your application to a Kubernetes cluster.
  • Release your application to a Blue-Green deployment.
  • Integrate Automation Pipelines with your own build, test, and deploy tools.
  • Use a REST API that integrates Automation Pipelines with other applications.
Track trends, metrics, and key performance indicators (KPIs). Create custom dashboards and gain insight about the performance of your pipelines.
Resolve problems. When a pipeline run fails, have Automation Pipelines create a Jira ticket.