In today's fast-paced development environment, efficient and reliable application deployment is critical to maintaining competitive advantage and delivering continuous value to your organization. Our recent webinar, "Mastering Pega Deployment Manager Pipelines," explored the comprehensive capabilities of Pega Deployment Manager, focusing on its out-of-the-box pipeline templates and best practices for implementing robust CI/CD workflows.
Understanding Deployment Manager
Deployment Manager is the standard and best way to test and deploy applications built on Pega Infinity. It's a no-code solution with out-of-the-box processes that cater to all the broad capabilities of DevOps while excelling in its understanding of Pega paradigms, including applications, product rules, and rule sets.
The primary aim of Deployment Manager is to promote high-quality releases to production with faster time to market. This is achieved through well-structured, automated pipeline processes that incorporate best practices at every stage.
Out-of-the-Box Pipeline Templates
Deployment Manager offers five pipeline templates, each designed to address specific business use cases:
- Merge Pipeline Template: Caters to gated merge requirements for developers working with branch-based development. It ensures changes are properly verified before being merged into the main application.
- Deployment Pipeline: Used for managing application release cycles, visualizing the entire release process from development to production.
- Deploy Artifact: Designed for specific use cases where you already have a production-ready artifact that needs to be deployed to production.
- Business Change Pipeline: Supports moving business-as-usual changes across environments as part of releases.
- Data Migration Pipeline: Facilitates migrating simulation data for analytical needs.
Best Practices Built Into Templates
The pipeline templates aren't just processes—they're carefully designed workflows that incorporate industry best practices. For example:
Merge Pipeline
Before code is merged into the main application, it's verified against:
- Potential conflicts
- Quality standards
- Development best practices
- Design standards
This gated approach ensures only high-quality code becomes part of the main application.
Deployment Pipeline
The standard four-stage pipeline (development, quality assurance, staging, and production) includes comprehensive gates at each stage:
- Development Stage: Focuses on development and packaging gates before generating an application artifact.
- Quality Assurance Stage: Emphasizes quality and security gates, including code coverage, quality guardrail compliance, security standards, and unit tests.
- Staging Stage: Centers on stability validation, checking for exceptions or database alerts that might indicate environment stability issues.
- Production Stage: The final deployment destination after all checks are passed.
These built-in best practices mean you don't need to brainstorm how CI/CD processes should look—Deployment Manager provides the foundation, which you can then customize to meet your specific requirements.
Key Enhancements and Features
Our product team continues to enhance Deployment Manager's capabilities:
- Improved Test Execution: With Infinity 25, the unit testing framework has been enhanced with parallelized execution, significantly improving testing speed.
- Integration Capabilities: Support for Jenkins, Azure DevOps, and upcoming GitHub Actions integration (expected in H1 2026).
- GenAI Features: Deployment Assistant to answer contextual queries, error analysis with suggested next steps, and deployment summaries.
Considerations for Complex Scenarios
The webinar addressed several advanced scenarios that organizations often encounter:
- Multiple Teams and Releases: Strategies for handling multiple teams working on different release timelines.
- Application Structure: Recommendations for separating structures based on production readiness (current, mid-term, long-term).
- Package Management: Best practices for maintaining consistency across environments by deploying complete application packages rather than individual rules.
Looking Ahead
This webinar is part one of a three-part series. Future sessions will cover advanced topics such as custom tasks, multi-team deployments, and business data pipelines. Based on audience questions, specific topics of interest include:
- Managing multiple versions of applications with different ruleset stacks for parallel development
- Advanced pipeline configurations for complex enterprise scenarios
- Business pipeline and data migration capabilities
Recommended resources:
- Deployment Manager Documentation
- Pega Community: Deployment Manager Best Practices
- Deployment Manager API Documentation
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