Introducing BuildPiper
This documentation provides a complete walkthrough of BuildPiper alongwith its newly added features. Technology teams can use this documentation to gain a better understanding of the product functionalities, features and its integrations with other tools.
What is BuildPiper?#
BuildPiper is a developer and engineering teams’ centric, fully-featured, end-to-end Kubernetes & Microservices Application Delivery Platform. It enables teams to onboard & securely manage Kubernetes & Microservices applications in a seamless manner. Also, the platform empowers teams with the ability to run zero-touch, fully automated & secured CI/CD pipelines.
BuildPiper has everything you need to deliver applications in compliance with your infrastructural requirements. It provides a robust foundation for growth and scalability with modern approaches of CI, CD, GitOps, Observability, Compliance and much more. BuildPiper seamlessly integrates with industry-leading tools like JIRA, SLACK, MS Teams, EFK, Prometheus/Grafana etc.
BuildPiper is a one-stop solution for managing the entire lifecycle of a containerized application. Right from environment setup to build and deployment- everything is available as a plug-and-play solution and is fully customizable.
Key Design Principles#
BuildPiper was developed considering the enterprises' need to build a strong foundation, centered around developer productivity, standard-based governance and reduced time-to-market. The platform contributes to the cost-efficacy of your Microservices journey by standardizing and accelerating application delivery.
Here are the fundamental design principles of this platform.
- Shift-Left Philosophy to improve Developer Productivity
- DevSecOps: Security across all Stages of Deployment
- Observability with Detailed Insights
- Enabling Seamless & Flexible CI/CD Operations
- GitOps Integration to accelerate the App Delivery Process
Principle 1: Shift-Left Philosophy to improve Developer Productivity#
BuildPiper allows developers and QA engineers to manage their Microservices Management-related tasks (that include build, deployment, observability, and environment management) independently. BuildPiper Features that contribute to the Shift-left approach include,
Deployment Analytics: Get detailed insights into service logs, pod status, container status, the total number of replicas, and deployment analytics.
Build & Deploy Analytics: Teams can obtain granular details of their builds & deploys such as the build analytics, build insights and deploy insights.
Deployment YAML Files: View the configuration files of deployed resources which include, the Replica Set Yaml, Pod Yaml, and Deployment YAML.
Technology teams can discover and analyze issues without the need for support from the DevOps team. This leads to tremendous enhancement in overall software delivery efficiency and team satisfaction.
Compliance without Support: BuildPiper has different templates to support functions across all stages of deployment that include separate built-in templates for Continuous Integration, Continuous Deployment, Security, JIRA, and Communication. The steps to execute a process can easily be performed securely and in compliance with the infrastructural requirements without the need for support.
Read how BuildPiper provides comprehensive Visualization of Deployment Status here.
Principle 2: DevSecOps: Security across all Stages of Deployment#
BuildPiper enables teams to conduct regular security audits and perform automated CI checks in the pipeline stages. BuildPiper enables seamless secrets management providing the ability to manage security from a centralised console to teams with a Key-Value pair!
Security Tools: Integrations with the best industry-standard tools for Security which include,
- Integration with HashiCorp Vault, AWS Secrets Manager, Azure Secrets Manager for Secrets Management
- Trivy for Container Images Scanning & License Scanning
- GitLeaks for Credentials Scanning
- Owasp Dependency Check to improve software security
- Sonar Scanner to analyze the source code quality
This DevSecOps platform allows teams to develop robust applications with built-in security right from the start. BuildPiper enables this by embedding security in all stages of the DevOps lifecycle.
Principle 3: Observability with Detailed Insights#
Obtain insights across every aspect of your Services( right from build to deployment), all Kubernetes resources and stages of Pipelines delivery via smart dashboards. These details help the development teams in analyzing and enhancing the application performance.
- 360-degree Cluster view via Service Kubernetes Dashboard
- Acquire Complete visibility into the cluster resources.
- Get data like what is the current replication of the service.
- View details of events and containers of the Pods.
- Monitor the performance, health status, and availability of Pods.
- Complete details of all Microservices via a Service Overview Dashboard
- View & monitor the build and deploy configuration details.
- Acquire a comprehensive overview of the service resources.
- Get details of all Microservices built & deployed across different environments(ex Dev,QA).
- View the complete history and log details of all builds & deploys.
Tools: Integration with infrastructure monitoring tools such as Prometheus, Grafana, and Alert Manager and log management tools like ElasticSearch, Fluentd, and Kibana.
Visibility across all Stages of CI/CD Pipeline Delivery & Setup
- Acquire insights into CI/CD historical data via inherent dashboards.
- Observe & analyze patterns to identify reasons for failure in CI/CD.
- View historical changes in the deployment configurations.
- Keep a check on the code quality.
- Get the YAML view of the Pipeline workflow with a simple click.
Deployment Analytics
- Insights into the service logs, pods status etc. and YAML files.
- Check the stability of data and system after service deployment.
- Monitor the changes in the deployment configuration.
The biggest challenge for teams is to discover why their deployment failed. Gain immediate insights into the potential reasons for a deployment failure- from service logs to container to pod status.
Principle 4: Enabling Seamless & Flexible CI/CD Operations#
Equipped with feature-rich, secure delivery & setup of CD Pipelines for Macro & Micro builds & deployments,
- Automated and Customizable CI gate checks.
- Comprehensive CI analysis with multiple language support.
- Support for conditional executions of Jobs & Stages.
- Integrations: JIRA integrations, API integrations and Microsoft teams integrations to notify pipeline issues for seamless application delivery.
- Multiple options to trigger the pipeline.
- Easy to understand UI and YAML view of the pipeline workflow consisting of multiple Jobs & Stages.
- Instant Rollbacks: Ability to Restart/Re-run the pipeline to resolve pipeline issues.
Principle 5: GitOps Integration to accelerate the App Delivery Process#
BuildPiper supports comprehensive GitOps-based workflow orchestration to make the software delivery process developer-centric. With essential check gates and approval, the platform enables seamless & faster deployments with standardization.
Right from build, to quality validation and ultimately releasing the source code to the production, developers can manage the complete application lifecycle, through git workflows and events.
- Event Listener: You can create event listeners to observe events occurring within the Git repo.
- Actions: Define actions that need to get triggered, once the listener receives the request.
Refer to the doc to know more about Gitops and its implementation in BuildPiper!