Managing upgrade fixes with Deployment Manager

Beginning in Pega Infinity 8.4, during a major or minor upgrade, you can use Deployment Manager to promote the latest application functionality to your production environment.

With a standard, consistent DevOps approach, you can assess the effect of the latest Pega Platform capabilities and plan your new feature adoption strategy across your environments after you upgrade to the latest version of Pega Infinity.

For more information about Deployment Manager, see the following topics:

• Understanding model-driven DevOps with Deployment Manager
• Understanding Deployment Manager architecture and workflows
• Installing, upgrading, and configuring Deployment Manager 4.8.x
• Configuring and running pipelines with Deployment Manager 4.8.x

For more information about configuring and deploying your upgrade pipelines, see the following topics:

• Configuring your application and test packages

  When you configure an upgrade pipeline, you provide an application product rule and a confidence test product rule.

• Configuring the cloned, staging environment to support branch merging

  If you use branches, you can use Deployment Manager to merge them on the cloned, staging environment into the base application. You can also run other merge tasks, such as receiving feedback for branch reviews.

• Configuring upgrade pipelines

  Create an upgrade pipeline for each application that you need to upgrade.

• Syncing rules between the production environment and the upgraded, cloned, staging environment

  For each application, promote an application product rule, which includes a sample of the production data and rule configurations used to complete thorough regression testing of the application on the upgraded cloned, staging environment. Use ad hoc tasks in Deployment Manager promote the rules. Ad hoc tasks are available in Deployment Manager 4.8.2 and later.

• Migrating upgrade fixes to production

  When you are ready to migrate your upgrade fixes, enable your staging and production stages and start a deployment to the production environment. On Pega Cloud Services, you perform these after entering your 60-minute validation window.

• Understanding confidence testing

  During the 60-minute window, clients validate that the production environment is ready for a Pega Infinity upgrade. Before the 60-minute window, clients should create a test plan to run smoke tests to ensure that the run-time behavior is correct. Clients should also perform a dry-run of the test plan on the Staging stage (temporary production environment).

• Migrating application upgrade changes to non-production environments

  After completing the upgrade on non-production environments, migrate the application upgrade changes to your non-production environments.