Pipeline patterns

We already know everything necessary to start a project and set up the continuous delivery pipeline with Jenkins, Docker, Kubernetes, Ansible, and Terraform. This section is intended to extend this knowledge with a few of the recommended Jenkins pipeline practices.

Parallelizing pipelines

In this book, we have always executed the pipeline sequentially, stage by stage, step by step. This approach makes it easy to reason the state and the result of the build. If there is first the acceptance test stage and then the release stage, it means that the release won't ever happen until the acceptance tests are successful. Sequential pipelines are simple to understand and usually do not cause any surprises. That's why the first method to solve any problem is to do it sequentially.

However, in some cases, the stages are time-consuming and it's worth running them in parallel. A very good example is performance tests. They usually take...