Why you should centrally orchestrate software delivery

An orchestrated pipeline strategy can revolutionize your software delivery. Once implemented, you can better embrace scalability and enforce robust security measures without sacrificing flexibility for individual team requirements. 

In the fast-paced world of software development, speed and quality are paramount. Traditional software delivery processes, however, are often riddled with bottlenecks—manual checks, tedious testing and cumbersome compliance procedures—leading to delays, increased risks and missed opportunities.

A centrally orchestrated pipeline is a software delivery pipeline that centrally orchestrates pipeline logic to manage different stages of delivery. This transformative solution automates and streamlines end-to-end workflows. This allows development teams to focus on writing code while ensuring that their code is automatically built, tested and deployed securely and compliantly with just a single click. This approach eliminates the complexity and manual oversight typically required for building, testing and deploying code, while ensuring that security and compliance are baked into every step of the process. Organizations can empower their development teams to focus on innovation rather than logistics, resulting in faster, more reliable software that meets business objectives and adheres to security and compliance regulations.

Capital One built a singular software delivery pipeline, and it was a huge success. In time, the entire enterprise got on board to implement a single, simple unified process that everyone could understand and use effectively. As we moved forward with implementing a centrally orchestrated deployment pipeline, we focused on the following key actions that allowed us to maintain flexibility while ensuring consistency and control:

• Defining pipeline requirements: The first step was to ensure we had a clear understanding of the common stages that should exist in all pipelines. These included source code checkout, build, unit and integration testing, deployment to staging environments, and deployment to production. With these software delivery stages standardized, we ensured that every team was following the same trusted process, minimizing the chance of errors or miscommunication.
• Choosing the right configuration format: Given the diversity of tools used across the organization, it was important to choose a configuration format that could support our needs. We settled on YAML for its human-readability, flexibility, and support across CI/CD platforms. For teams already using Jenkins (CICD platform), we also used Jenkinsfiles (Groovy) to maintain consistency in toolchain configurations across projects.
• Creating the central configuration file: The core of the strategy was developing a reusable template for the pipeline configuration. We parameterized the template to allow for customization based on development project-specific needs, such as repository URLs and deployment environments. This modularity ensured that the pipeline could scale across hundreds of projects without the need for significant adjustments.
• Integrating with existing deployment pipelines: Version control became an essential part of the process. By storing our central pipeline configuration in a version control system, we treated the pipeline as another piece of code. This allowed teams to track changes, roll back if necessary, and apply updates in a controlled manner. With Pipeline-as-Code, we also ensured that all configuration changes were transparent and aligned with the rest of our development practices.
• Testing and refining: Rigorous testing was essential. We implemented unit tests to verify each pipeline stage, as well as integration tests to ensure that all stages worked together seamlessly. Continuous monitoring helped us identify bottlenecks and refine the pipeline iteratively. Feedback loops with developers and operations teams played a crucial role in making ongoing improvements.

A centrally orchestrated pipeline strategy offers a comprehensive solution to streamline both software delivery and business operations at scale. 

On the software delivery side, adopting a centrally orchestrated pipeline can enhance operational efficiency by automating processes that once required manual intervention. This can potentially reduce human error, accelerate development and deployment cycles, and ultimately lead to faster release cycles for organizations. A centrally orchestrated pipeline can also integrate automated vulnerability scans and compliance checks, ensuring security and regulatory standards are enforced throughout the delivery process. This proactive approach can significantly mitigate risks and maintain consistency at every stage of the software lifecycle.

The pipeline’s framework is flexible enough to support various technologies and deployment strategies, allowing the organization to scale as it adopts new tools and languages. Developers can gain more time to innovate, as the pipeline handles many of the tedious operational tasks, empowering teams to focus on delivering new features.

From a business operations perspective, the centrally orchestrated pipeline can generate substantial cost savings by automating workflows and standardizing processes. These savings can be reinvested in more strategic business areas, such as new product development and market expansion. Furthermore, the can pipeline provide real-time visibility into build health, security status and resource allocation, giving executives the insights they need to make data-driven decisions.

By reducing manual intervention and automating compliance and security checks, the strategy can also help mitigate the risk of costly failures or breaches. This can provide the organization with a stronger risk mitigation framework and ensure that software delivery processes directly contribute to business objectives, such as customer satisfaction, revenue growth and competitive advantage.

A centrally orchestrated pipeline improves the software delivery experience. It standardizes and streamlines the build, test and deploy process, which saves time and effort while ensuring consistent quality assurance and error reduction.

• Standardized build and deployment process: A unified pipeline eliminates the inconsistency of handling different build tools and deployment strategies across teams. Every project follows the same trusted path, reducing errors and ensuring reliability.
• Improved quality and security: Automated vulnerability scans, code quality checks and compliance verifications become standard practices. This proactive approach allows teams to catch data security issues early and ensure that their code meets functional and non-functional requirements before reaching production.
• Enhanced operational excellence: Automated deployment strategies, such as blue-green and canary deployments, can minimize customer impact and downtime. The centralized pipeline also allows for real-time monitoring, helping teams detect and address issues before they affect users.
• Cultural transformation: One of the most significant changes for Capital One was the shift towards a “You Build, You Own” model. With this type of shift, developers gain more ownership of the entire software lifecycle, which can not only improve accountability but also encourage collaboration and innovation.
• Faster time to market: Automation allows teams to release new features, bug fixes and updates significantly faster. This responsiveness to customer needs and market shifts becomes a competitive advantage.

Below are some best practices that proved essential to the successful implementation and management of a centrally orchestrated pipeline in a large organization:

• Maintain simplicity: A clear, simple pipeline configuration is easier to maintain and scale. The more complex you make it, the harder it is to troubleshoot, onboard new team members, and make changes. By avoiding unnecessary complexity, we ensured that the pipeline remained agile and adaptable as our needs evolved.
• Leverage parameters for flexibility: Parameterization was key to ensuring that the pipeline could support a wide range of projects and environments. This allowed us to create one central pipeline configuration that could be easily customized without altering the underlying structure.
• Test thoroughly: Given the scale at which we were working, it was critical that we implemented a robust testing strategy. We wrote unit tests to validate each pipeline stage and integration tests to ensure smooth interactions between stages. We also focused on testing edge cases and potential failure points to ensure the pipeline would function in all scenarios.
• Document changes and version control: With multiple teams using the pipeline, it was essential to document every change in a centralized location. This transparency ensured everyone was aligned and that the pipeline configuration could be tracked over time. Version control helped us roll back changes when necessary and maintain consistency across environments.
• Integrate security and compliance: Security and compliance were baked into the pipeline itself. With automated vulnerability scans, dependency checks, and compliance verifications, we ensured that every deployment adhered to corporate security policies and regulatory requirements. By integrating these checks early, we minimized risks and reduced the burden on individual teams.

Adopting a centrally orchestrated pipeline was one of the most impactful decisions we made to streamline our software delivery process. By centralizing configuration, automating key processes and embedding security and compliance checks, we enabled faster, more reliable and secure releases at scale.
This shift transformed not only how we develop and deploy software, but also how we collaborate as an organization.

Developers are empowered to focus on innovation, while the pipeline takes care of ensuring quality, security and compliance. As a result, we delivered better software faster, driving business success while reducing risk and operational complexity.

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