On the Design and Architecture of Deployment Pipelines in Cloud and Service-Based Computing – A Model-Based Qualitative Study

Abstract

DevOps and Continuous Delivery (CD) are becoming the de-facto standard for software deployment in the cloud. Deployment pipelines are a core artefact in such practices, but so far their design is largely discussed informally, and existing sources on DevOps and CD practices are often inconsistent or incomplete. The lack of a generic, complete, tool-agnostic, and application-independent treatment of deployment pipeline design and architecture impedes their understanding by human designers and the creation of generic tools that work across different technologies and applications. To alleviate this problem, we have performed a qualitative, in-depth study of 25 deployment practice descriptions by practitioners containing informal deployment pipeline models. From our study we derived a precisely specified model of deployment pipeline architectures. We can show that the formal model substantially increases the precision of the modelling compared to the informally modelled pipelines in the original sources.

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• https://zenodo.org/record/3476556 under the license http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode

• http://dx.doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.2790643,

https://zenodo.org/record/3476556 under the license http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode

• http://dx.doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3476556,

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• http://xplorestaging.ieee.org/ielx7/8798918/8813909/08814264.pdf?arnumber=8814264,

http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/scc.2019.00033 under the license http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode

• https://dblp.uni-trier.de/db/conf/IEEEscc/scc2019.html#ZdunNPM0019,

https://academic.microsoft.com/#/detail/2970180145

• https://zenodo.org/record/2671625,

http://dx.doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.2671624

• https://zenodo.org/record/2671625,

http://dx.doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.2671625 under the license http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode

• https://zenodo.org/record/2790644,

http://dx.doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.2790644 under the license http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode

under the license http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode

DOIS: 10.5281/zenodo.2671625 10.5281/zenodo.3476556 10.5281/zenodo.2790643 10.5281/zenodo.2790644 10.5281/zenodo.2671624 10.1109/scc.2019.00033