Completing the continuous delivery pipeline

Now that we've covered Ansible, environments, non-functional testing, and versioning, we are ready to extend the Jenkins pipeline and finalize a simple, but complete, CD pipeline.

Follow these steps:

1. Create the inventory of staging and production environments.
2. Use version in the Kubernetes deployment.
3. Use a remote Kubernetes cluster as the staging environment.
4. Update the acceptance tests so that they use the staging Kubernetes cluster.
5. Release the application to the production environment.
6. Add a smoke test that makes sure the application was released successfully.

Let's start by creating an inventory.

Inventory

We looked at the inventory file in the previous chapter while describing Ansible. To generalize this concept, an inventory contains a list of environments that describe how to access them. In this example, we'll use Kubernetes directly, so the Kubernetes...