Managing upgrade fixes with Deployment Manager

Beginning in Pega Infinity release 8.4.2, you can create pipelines in Deployment Manager version 4.8.2 or later to promote the latest application functionality to your production environment. By using Deployment Manager as a standard DevOps approach during upgrades, 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 Using Deployment Manager for model-driven DevOps.

• Configuring your application and test packages

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

• Configuring upgrade pipelines

  Configure pipelines for each application that you want to upgrade. Use these pipelines to promote the product rules that contain your application and upgrade fixes

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

  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, deploy your changes first to the ephemeral stage and then to production. Promoting your application and upgrading to production ensures that your application is updated with the latest features and capabilities after an upgrade. On Pega Cloud Services, you perform these steps after entering your 60-minute validation window.

• Understanding confidence testing

  Before a production system upgrade, you perform confidence testing on the temporary production environment to validate that the production environment is ready for a Pega Infinity upgrade. For Pega Cloud Services upgrades, confidence testing occurs within a 60-minute window. Before performing confidence testing, you should create a test plan to run smoke tests to ensure that the run-time behavior is correct. You should also perform a preliminary run of the test plan on the 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. By migrating your upgrade fixes to your non-production environment, you ensure that your application is updated with the latest features and capabilities after an upgrade.