Quick start: Multi-environment promotion with gates

Promote product apps between multiple environments with promotion conditions

Now that we have covered Multi-environment sequential promotion, let’s move on to configuring conditions for promotions, ensuring that each environment’s specific requirements are met before changes are promoted.

Codefresh makes it easy to automate and enforce gates throughout your promotion processes using Promotion Workflows. Promotion Workflows are essentially Argo Workflows customized for promoting changes through your environments.
For detailed information, see Configuring Promotion Workflows.

Promotion Workflows for promotion gates

Promotion Workflows are designed to define the conditions under which changes are promoted to the next environment. They provide a way to automate testing, quality checks, validation, and any other requirements based on your deployment process, establishing gates that control the flow of changes between environments.

You can create workflows tailored to the specific tasks required during a promotion and categorize them based on the stage of the promotion process in which they are executed, as Pre- and Post-Action Workflows.

Pre-Action Workflow

A Promotion Workflow that runs before the promotion action is triggered. These workflows can be used for tasks like smoke tests, unit tests, security scans, or any other validation that must pass before a change is promoted to the next environment.

The Pre-Action Workflow plays a critical role in ensuring that changes meet all necessary requirements before being promoted to the next environment. It acts as the gatekeeper, validating changes and stopping the promotion if any tests or validations fail.

Post-Action Workflows

A Promotion Workflow that runs after the promotion action has completed. These workflows can be used for tasks like performance monitoring, database migrations, or notifications to inform stakeholders that the promotion is complete.

The Post-Action Workflow allows you to monitor and verify the effects of the promotion after it has taken place. This workflow helps ensure the promoted changes behave as expected in the new environment.

Assign Pre- and Post-Action Workflows to environments in Promotion Flow

To ensure each environment’s specific requirements are met, assign workflows to govern promotion behavior.

In this quick start, we’ll define the Promotion Workflows to govern promotion behavior for the qa and prod environments.

Before you begin

• Create Promotion Workflows

Step-by-step

1. From the Promotion Flow list, select the Promotion Flow you created, multi-env-sequential-promotion for the quick start.
2. In the Settings panel, update the Version to indicate changes, for example, 2.0.
3. Assign the workflows by clicking the respective controls and selecting the Promotion Workflows and the Promotion Action from the list. The example below shows the Pre-Action Workflows available.

4. Repeat step 3 to select the Workflows and Actions for the other target environments in the Promotion Flow. For this quick start, we’ll select the same workflows and the same promotion action for prod.

Here’s the YAML view of the flow with the workflows and promotion actions.

5. To save the changes, click Save Promotion Flow.
6. Continue with Trigger Promotion Flow and monitor product release.

Trigger Promotion Flow and monitor product release

Now that we have updated the Promotion Flow with the appropriate Pre- and Post-Action Workflows, we can trigger the flow and monitor its progress.

The difference between the previous release (without workflows), and this one (with workflows), for the same Promotion Flow (multi-env-sequential-promotion), is that changes will only be promoted to the next environment when all workflows associated with the previous environment are complete.

1. Open the Promotion Flow, multi-env-sequential-promotion and click Trigger.
2. Select the product, the application to promote, and then click Trigger once again.
3. Click View Release Details.
   In the example below, the current release view shows the qa and prod environments with the Pre- and Post-Action Workflows defined for each environment.

What’s next

In the next quick start for promotions, we’ll explore how to configure Promotion Flows for parallel promotions, allowing changes to be promoted simultaneously across multiple environments.

Quick start: Multi-environment parallel promotion