The application development life cycle is a traditionally lengthy and a manual process. In addition, it requires effective collaboration between development and operations teams. The deployment pipeline is a demonstration of automation involved in the application development life cycle containing the automated build execution and test execution, notification to the stakeholder, and deployment in different runtime environments. Effectively, the deployment pipeline is a combination of CI and continuous delivery, and hence is a part of DevOps practices. The following diagram depicts the deployment pipeline process:

Members of the development team check code into a source code repository. CI products such as Jenkins are configured to poll changes from the code repository. Changes in the repository are downloaded to the local workspace and Jenkins triggers an automated build process, which is assisted by Ant or Maven. Automated test execution or unit testing, static code analysis, reporting, and notification of successful or failed build process are also part of the CI process.

Once the build is successful, it can be deployed to different runtime environments such as testing, preproduction, production, and so on. Deploying a war file in terms of the JEE application is normally the final stage in the deployment pipeline.

One of the biggest benefits of the deployment pipeline is the faster feedback cycle. Identification of issues in the application at early stages and no dependencies on manual efforts make this entire end-to-end process more effective.

In the next chapters, we will see how Jenkins can be used for implementing CI practices in modernizing IT.