Overview

Overview about PipeCD.

PipeCD - a GitOps style continuous delivery solution

What Is PipeCD?

PipeCD provides a unified continuous delivery solution for multiple application kinds on multi-cloud that empowers engineers to deploy faster with more confidence, a GitOps tool that enables doing deployment operations by pull request on Git.

Why PipeCD?

  • Simple, unified and easy to use but powerful pipeline definition to construct your deployment
  • Same deployment interface to deploy applications of any platform, including Kubernetes, Terraform, GCP Cloud Run, AWS Lambda, AWS ECS
  • No CRD or applications’ manifest changes are required; Only need a pipeline definition along with your application manifests
  • No deployment credentials are exposed or required outside the application cluster
  • Built-in deployment analysis as part of the deployment pipeline to measure impact based on metrics, logs, emitted requests
  • Easy to interact with any CI; The CI tests and builds artifacts, PipeCD takes the rest
  • Insights show metrics like lead time, deployment frequency, MTTR and change failure rate to measure delivery performance
  • Designed to manage thousands of cross-platform applications in multi-cloud for company scale but also work well for small projects

PipeCD’s Characteristics in detail

Visibility

  • Deployment pipeline UI shows clarify what is happening
  • Separate logs viewer for each individual deployment
  • Realtime visualization of application state
  • Deployment notifications to slack, webhook endpoints
  • Insights show metrics like lead time, deployment frequency, MTTR and change failure rate to measure delivery performance

Automation

  • Automated deployment analysis to measure deployment impact based on metrics, logs, emitted requests
  • Automatically roll back to the previous state as soon as analysis or a pipeline stage fails
  • Automatically detect configuration drift to notify and render the changes
  • Automatically trigger a new deployment when a defined event has occurred (e.g. container image pushed, helm chart published, etc)

Safety and Security

  • Support single sign-on and role-based access control
  • Credentials are not exposed outside the cluster and not saved in the Control Plane
  • Piped makes only outbound requests and can run inside a restricted network
  • Built-in secrets management

Multi-provider & Multi-Tenancy

  • Support multiple application kinds on multi-cloud including Kubernetes, Terraform, Cloud Run, AWS Lambda, Amazon ECS
  • Support multiple analysis providers including Prometheus, Datadog, Stackdriver, and more
  • Easy to operate multi-cluster, multi-tenancy by separating Control Plane and Piped

Open Source

  • Released as an Open Source project
  • Under APACHE 2.0 license, see LICENSE

Where should I go next?

For a good understanding of the PipeCD’s components.

  • Concepts: describes each components.
  • FAQ: describes the difference between PipeCD and other tools.

If you are an operator wanting to install and configure PipeCD for other developers.

If you are a user using PipeCD to deploy your application/infrastructure:

If you want to be a contributor:


Last modified November 6, 2023: Update docs for overview (#4655) (8b0a501e)