Why Windchill needs a pipeline
On many installations a release still means an engineer copying files onto servers, running commands from a wiki page and hoping the test environment really matched production. It works until the engineer is on holiday. A pipeline turns that knowledge into code that runs the same way every time.
What our pipelines do
- Build. Compile and package customizations from a tagged version.
- Test. Run fast tests, then deploy to a fresh environment and test the key business flows on it.
- Package. Produce one versioned package that is promoted unchanged.
- Promote. Deploy to test, then production, with an approval step and a recorded decision.
- Verify. Check that the system is healthy and the key flows work after the deployment.
- Roll back. Return to the previous version with one action, tested regularly rather than assumed.
Infrastructure as code
Servers, networks, databases and clusters are described in code and configured automatically. A new test environment is a pipeline run, not a ticket to another team.
No containers required
Pipelines pay off on plain virtual machines too. Many customers start there and move to containers later, with the same pipeline and one changed deployment stage.