14. CI pipelines in dev

Date: 2021-12-07

Status

Accepted

Context

Issue #448 discussed the possibility of skipping “review” and “qa” stages for pipelines in the dev GitLab instance. This was proposed because running these stages adds complexity and resource costs, so we wanted to be sure we were getting enough value out of that configuration.

Decision

  1. Pipelines on dev will only run for stable branches, release tags, and (manually-pushed) feature branches.
  2. Pipelines on dev for stable branches will run the tests against the CI clusters.
  3. Pipelines on dev for release tags will not run the tests against the CI clusters.
  4. Pipelines on dev for feature branches will happen when the branch is manually pushed to dev, and will run the tests against CI clusters.

Consequences

  1. Pipelines on dev will no longer run for commits to master.
  2. Cluster resources on dev will be under less load due to fewer review environments.
  3. Pipelines on dev will need to be fixed by adding an image pull secret because the dev GitLab instance (and therefore its container registry) is private (#449).