Application deployment within Salus involves a structured process for releasing software updates, changes, or new features to various environments. Salus’ deployment functionality is seamlessly integrated within its CI/CD pipelines. These pipelines automate the steps required for building, testing, and deploying applications, resulting in consistent and repeatable processes.
Integrating your project with a Version Control System (VCS) provider, such as GitLab, GitHub, brings a plethora of advantages, especially when it comes to deploying applications. This integration offers a seamless pathway to streamline the deployment process, enhance collaboration, and ensure consistent releases.
Application deployment offers a multitude of benefits that contribute to efficient software development, deployment, and maintenance. Here are some of the key advantages:
Faster Release Cycles: Automated deployment processes enable frequent releases, allowing teams to deliver new features, bug fixes, and improvements to users rapidly. This agility keeps the software up-to-date and competitive in a rapidly evolving market.
Consistency: Automated deployment ensures that every environment, from development to production, is configured consistently. This minimizes issues caused by environmental discrepancies and reduces the "it works on my machine" problem.
Reduced Manual Errors: Manual deployment is prone to human errors. Automated deployment scripts and processes eliminate the risk of mistakes during repetitive tasks, leading to more reliable releases.
Predictable Results
: Automated deployments follow predefined and tested procedures, resulting in consistent and predictable outcomes. This predictability helps in risk assessment and planning.
Environment variables are dynamic values that can affect the behavior of software applications or processes running on a computer system. They provide a way to store and manage configuration settings, credentials, paths, and other runtime/build time parameters outside of the codebase.
Some environment variables contain sensitive information, such as passwords, API keys, and access tokens. These values are considered "secrets" because they grant access to critical systems or services, and if exposed, they could lead to security breaches or unauthorized access.
To protect sensitive information, secrets need to be handled securely. This is why certain environment variables can be configured as secrets on the Salus platform.
There are currently two ways to configure environment variables on Salus. Environment variables can either be configured as part of the Release Configuration, or when running a pipeline.
To define and configure environment variables as part of a release configuration: