Note
Applications with CD environments can use Cloud Next. However, such environments are not yet powered by Cloud Next.
Developers thrive on a continuous delivery process in which their time is spent creating, and not waiting for tools, environments, or delays due to bottlenecks in processing pull requests from multiple developers. To assist with this need, Cloud Platform CD provides developer and tester teams a continuous delivery cloud service, allowing them to accelerate integration and delivery of production-ready features.
Cloud Platform CD is developer-ready, automating the process of building and testing your application with Pipelines orchestration and production-like environments, all seamlessly integrated with the Cloud Platform platform.
Features
Cloud Platform CD helps development teams increase their productivity, code quality, and the performance of the development-to-staging process by providing a consistent toolkit for continuous building, testing, and integration of code. Available features include the following:
Self-service, production-like environments: Eliminates the need to move code and testing between multiple cloud platforms. It saves time and reduces the risk of errors by allowing you to provision and deprovision production-like environments in Cloud Platform on your own.
Seamless Cloud Platform integration: Provides a single environment for continuous integration and delivery with self-service, production-like environments.
Automated development governance: When used with Pipelines, brings speed and velocity to developers while lowering risks in quality, stability, and intellectual property. The automation benefits of ready-to-use building and testing tools, coupled with self-service environments, greatly reduce code and versioning inconsistencies.
Why use Cloud Platform CD?
Code that is built frequently needs consistency to achieve continuous integration. However, it can be challenging for individual developers on a team to achieve consistency.
In traditional deployment workflows, you must do the work of assembling a website’s deployment image in your code repository. For example, to update a module, you must copy the new version of the module into your repository. Also, for deployment workflows based on local builds, each developer must ensure they have all the correct version of all prerequisites (such as PHP, Git, or Cloud Platform repository access) available, and all developers must be able to consistently replicate this development environment locally.
Working together, Cloud Platform CD and Pipelines can contain only your website’s version-controlled build instructions and private resources. You can keep the canonical version of external resources outside of your repository, and pull in the latest or other required version as you build your website for deployment. Cloud Platform CD also provides a consistent build and testing environment to all developers in a cloud-based container, which has access to production-like environments you can create or remove as needed.
Getting started with Cloud Platform CD
To get started with creating and using CD environments for your continuous development and delivery, see Managing Cloud Platform CD environments.