What is Alibaba Cloud DevOps Flow?
Alibaba Cloud DevOps Flow (hereinafter referred to as Flow) is an enterprise-level automated R&D and delivery pipeline platform. Flow provides flexible and easy-to-use features of continuous integration, continuous verification, and continuous deployment to help enterprises deliver business with high quality and high efficiency.
Pipelines are the carrier of continuous delivery. A pipeline can be automatically created, integrated, verified, and deployed to enable continuous delivery for your business from development to release. You can use pipelines to continuously provide immediate feedback to your business team. This makes the delivery process efficient and smooth.
Benefits of Flow
Easy deployment
You do not need to purchase component hardware or software. This significantly reduces costs.
In Alibaba Cloud DevOps, after you create your enterprise workspaces, you can use the pipeline service in a few minutes.
Simple management
Alibaba Cloud is responsible for routine maintenance and management of underlying resource infrastructure and runtime environment. Those tasks include hardware troubleshooting, software releasing and patching.
Tenant isolation
You can create multiple enterprise workspaces. Data in different workspaces is isolated to ensure high security and reliability.
High stability and reliability
Alibaba Cloud DevOps Flow provides stable and reliable services. Alibaba Cloud DevOps Flow deploys its services in multiple zones and provides build execution clusters in multiple zones. In Alibaba Cloud DevOps Flow, you can scale build resources to provide high availability for continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD).
Various supported pipeline sources
Flow supports various types of pipeline sources, such as code sources. Flow allows enterprises to use flexible custom pipeline sources to enable CI/CD with ease.
You can use the industry-wide code repositories as the pipeline sources. The following types of code repositories are supported:
Self-managed Git repository
Guaranteed business delivery with high quality
Flow provides features such as code scanning and security scanning, and various capabilities for automated tests. Flow allows you to set red lines and compare business quality with the red lines by performing manual verification or automated verification. This ensures the quality of business to be delivered.
Better support for software release
Deeply integrated with Alibaba Cloud services, Flow allows you to release software in different countries, cloud environments provided by different cloud vendors, and Apsara Stack environments. By using the policies of canary release and phased release, Flow minimizes the impact of unstable release on users and ensures the stability of business delivery.
The following release methods are supported:
Server script release
Canary release
Kubernetes
Release by using Kubectl
Kubernetes canary release
Kubernetes blue-green release