The Cycloid pipeline: new features to make it even more useful than before

The pipeline is a core element of your stack and, in conjunction with infrastructure as code and config management, is an essential part of your environment. We decided it needed a little more love, and we’re proud to present our latest release which does just that. The new and improved Cycloid pipeline introduces two major improvements that will make managing your pipelines intuitive and safer, and a third improvement that will make ops very happy indeed!

TL;DR

We’ve launched a new pipeline overview and two complementary features - diff pipelines and multiple use cases. Pipeline Overview gives you a clear, color-coded overview of your pipeline. Diff Pipeline allows you to review pipeline changes before you apply them and, finally, Multiple use cases allow you to create environments with multiple workflow options. Cool, eh?

Pipeline Overview

Pipeline overview is, as the name suggests, an overview of your pipelines. What’s gotten us excited is just how visual and intuitive it is, making it easier than ever for everyone on your team - technical or not - to have a really clear understanding of your pipeline and jobs. 

This overview is especially important if you have a large number of projects - with pipeline overview, you can see the status of all of them at once, without having to navigate between multiple views. 

As you can see from the image above, every job is color-coded according to the status. You’ll also see how long it has had that status, which is handy for troubleshooting. Clicking on a job will redirect you to the pipeline where you can see specific jobs and build logs for each.

It’s a feature that’s equally useful for developers as it is for IT managers - devs can easily see and troubleshoot jobs, while IT and project managers can see what’s going on without getting into the weeds (as well as having an interface that’s perfect for sharing with others, on large screens or small).

Diff Pipelines

Our diff pipelines are a brand new feature and a direct answer to some of the problems we saw in some of our clients’ pipelines. To fully understand the feature, you first need to understand the difference between a running pipeline and a pipeline template.

Your running pipeline is created from a pipeline template, which in turn is stored in your Git repository. When you edit your running pipeline, however, you’re not editing the template and, in turn, when you edit the template, you don’t necessarily change your running pipeline. By editing your running pipeline, you’re making changes that will affect production, so you need to make sure they’re not causing errors. We’ve created diff pipeline to allow you to review these changes easily before you make them - no messing about with the command line needed!

Multiple-use case

Multiple-use case allows you to create environments with multiple workflow options from your stack specifications. So, for example, you can create a template that offers a choice of cloud providers or pipelines but you don’t need to create a brand new template for each possible variation. 

Once you’ve created a template with a set of use cases, every environment created from that template will have one of those options by default. Once the project has been created, you can still change the default pipeline by selecting the Reset pipeline button, then changing the selected pipeline by clicking on it.

So, how might you use this feature? Well, by providing a pre-approved range of options, you can give end-users choice and flexibility, without compromising too much on governance and order. Alternatively, you could also use it for clearly differentiating between prod and staging, when you need to use one tool in one, and another in the other!

Pipelines, polished

A pipeline is the core element of a stack, the feature that, quite literally, brings it all together. It was only right that we showed Cycloid’s pipeline feature a little love, taking a set of tools that everyone uses and leveling them up so that they can become an absolute pleasure to use. Whether Next time you log in, be sure to check them out and share with other members of the team who might be interested in using them. If you'd like to find out more about the technical aspects of the new pipeline features, check out the tech doc.