Pipelines

Plural Pipelines provide a way to automate the GitOps changes necessary to promote software across environments. The standard approach would be something like this:

1. Create a PR for dev, wait for review and merge
2. Create a PR for staging, same as above
3. finally create a PR for prod and you're done.

This is tedious and completely unnecessary. In addition, you'll also want to automate a variety of confirmation tests along the promotion process, which can be missed in a manual pattern.

Plural solves this by:

1. Allowing users to define their promotion flow via CRD
2. Across all stages, a PR is auto-generated using Plural's pr automation capabilities.
3. Between stages, gates can be used to control promotion, with a variety of different checks that can be performed.

Pipeline Flavors

There are two ways to accomplish a pipeline with Plural:

• Deterministic PR Automation based pipelining
• AI based PR based pipelining

The main difference is the second uses prompting plus lightweight coding agents to accomplish the needed yaml changes to promote your software. Since they are usually small config changes, this is usually very reliable, and often much easier to setup for developers of all skill levels, but for teams that desire the security of determinism, that is available as well.

Before we go into exact pipeline examples, assume we have two plural services defined in a file bootstrap/guestbook.yaml like so: