Deployment Environments & CI/CD Workflow

• What are Deployment Environments?
• The CI/CD Github Actions
  • Comparing Deployment Environment Actions

What are Deployment Environments?

Berkeleytime has three deployment environments: production, staging, and development. The production environment refers to the live deployed website seen by users of Berkeleytime and should contain code already tested in the other two environments. The staging and development environments are primarily used by Berkeleytime developers/designers to test new code.

• Production: Finalized changes merged in main are manually deployed here at berkeleytime.com
• Staging: Changes already merged in main are automatically deployed here at staging.berkeleytime.com
• Development: Specific git branches can be manually deployed here.

The CI/CD Github Actions

We use GitHub actions to build our CI/CD workflows.¹ All three CI/CD workflows² are fairly similar to each other and can all be broken into two phases: the build and the deploy phase.

1. Build Phase: An application container and Helm chart are built and pushed to a registry. We use Docker Hub. This process is what .github/workflows/cd-build.yaml is responsible for and is run in the Github Action environment.

2. Deploy Phase: After the container and Helm chart are built and pushed to a registry, they are pulled and deployed onto hozer-51. This process is what .github/workflows/cd-deploy.yaml is responsible for and is run in the Github Action environment ssh'd into hozer-51.

Comparing Deployment Environment Actions

The differences between the three environments are managed by each individual workflow file: cd-dev.yaml, cd-stage.yaml, and cd-prod.yaml.