Environments and Pipelines

What are Environments

Environments are a stand-alone, sandboxed grouping of resources that allow you to deploy an instance of an Aineko Project into. This allows for faster development cycles as the feedback loop is tightened.

Deployment branches

These are branches that correspond to environments. For example, the develop environment will be based off the develop branch. Every time the develop branch changes, Aineko Cloud will attempt to update the develop environment to match what is reflected in the codebase.

Initial environments

By default, we initialize the 2 environments develop and production for every repository. This is in line to best engineering best practices where developers use a develop environment to test the latest version of the codebase before deploying it into production.

Environment separation

Each environment is within its own VPC, and so are unable to communicate with each other. This ensure they do not impact each other in any way, so for example a bug in develop should never affect your production environment.

In the example deployment configuration below, the environments block configures the pipeline to run for each environment. Note that deployments are only triggered when commits are made to the branch that matches the environment name. For example, only the pipelines under the develop key are deployed when this file is committed to the develop branch.

Example deploy.yml

version: 0.1.0
environments:
  develop:
    pipelines:
      - example_pipeline_1
      - example_pipeline_2
  production:
    pipelines:
      - example_pipeline_2
pipelines:
  example_pipeline_1:
    source: conf/pipeline_1.yml
  example_pipeline_2:
    source: conf/pipeline_2.yml

Here are a few examples on the deployment behavior when the example deployment configuration is committed to different branches:

Example deployment scenarios when commit is made to different branches

Commit to developCommit to productionCommit to feature_branch

develop environment

example_pipeline_1 and example_pipeline_2 are deployed or updated to reflect any new changes.

production environment

Remains untouched; any pipelines currently running there remains unaffected.

develop environment

Remains untouched; any pipelines currently running there remains unaffected.

production environment

example_pipeline_2 is deployed or updated to reflect any new changes.

develop environment

Remains untouched; any pipelines currently running there remains unaffected.

production environment

Remains untouched; any pipelines currently running there remains unaffected.

Create a new Environment

Warning

Note, for the Beta release of Aineko Cloud, we allow up to 4 different environments per project.

Warning

The environment name must be 1 to 24 characters long and can only contain letters, numbers, and dashes.

To create a new environment in addition to the default develop and production environments, you can simply update deploy.yml to reflect this. For example, to create a staging environment, push the following deploy.yml to a branch called staging:

Example deploy.yml with staging environment

version: 0.1.0

environments:
  develop:
    pipelines:
      - example_pipeline_1
      - example_pipeline_2
  staging:
    pipeline:
      - example_pipeline_2
  production:
    pipelines:
      - example_pipeline_2
pipelines:
  example_pipeline_1:
    source: conf/pipeline_1.yml
  example_pipeline_2:
    source: conf/pipeline_2.yml

This will trigger the initialize-environment workflow, which kicks off the provisioning of the environment. Similar to the earlier step Create an Aineko Project, this step will take 60-90 minutes. Thereafter, you will be able to quickly and easily deploy pipelines just like you would to the develop and production environments.

Destroying Pipelines in an Environment

To destroy a pipeline existing in an environment, we can simply remove that pipeline name from the environment key. Following on from the above example, if we wanted to destroy example_pipeline_1 from the develop environment, we would commit the following deployment configuration to the develop branch:

Example deploy.yml to destroy pipeline

version: 0.1.0
environments:
  develop:
    pipelines:
      - example_pipeline_2
  staging:
    pipeline:
      - example_pipeline_2
  production:
    pipelines:
      - example_pipeline_2
pipelines:
  example_pipeline_1:
    source: conf/pipeline_1.yml
  example_pipeline_2:
    source: conf/pipeline_2.yml

To remove all pipelines from an environment, remove the relevant environment key. For example, you would remove the staging block to destroy all pipelines in that environment.

Limitation: removing all pipelines across environments

The environments key is required for a valid deployment configuration. Hence, to remove all pipelines across every environment, you will need a deploy.yml that looks like the following:

version: 0.1.0
environments:
  develop:
    pipelines: []

Delete an Environment

Destroying all pipelines in an environment does not destroy the environment

Destroying pipelines does not destroy the other services running in the background that make the magic of an Aineko Cloud environment possible. These inactive environments will still count to the 4 environment limit.

To completely destroy an environment, first make sure that any pipelines running on it is successfully destroyed. Then reach out to us at support@aineko.dev to request an environment deletion. The deletion process will take about a day.

Note that once an environment is deleted, if we ever want to add it back, it will have to be re-initialized.