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Deployment Tracks

Deployment Tracks in Devant are structured pathways for simplified integration deployment. They act like advanced CI/CD pipelines, ensuring your integrations reach their destinations seamlessly. They establish an organized and structured approach that minimizes the chances of errors and challenges that are typically associated with deployment workflows.

The Significance of Deployment Tracks

Deployment Tracks offer practical solutions to enhance the API consumer experience by addressing two critical challenges:

  • Streamlined deployment: Deployment Tracks serve as well-designed routes for your integrations, enhancing the organization and reliability of the deployment process, similar to a well-structured express route.

  • Efficient API versioning: Especially beneficial for managed APIs, Deployment Tracks provide a straightforward method for creating API versions that seamlessly interact with previous iterations. This simplified version management benefits both API creators and consumers alike.

Streamlined deployments

For streamlined deployments, Devant dissects two integral approaches that leverage Deployment Tracks: the comprehensive CI/CD integration and the focused CD-Only strategy.

CI/CD with Deployment Tracks

A deployment track is linked to a particular branch within a GitHub repository. This connection is useful for handling deployments to various environments. On the Deploy page, you can easily visualize the deployments to specific environments associated with your selected deployment track. Merging a pull request (PR) automatically triggers a deployment to the development environment.

Deployment tracks - source repo

Efficient API versioning

This section applies only to Integration as APIs. When working with Integration as APIs in Devant, it is important to have an effective API versioning mechanism. Devant follows a versioning mechanism based on Semantic Versioning (SemVer) but only includes the major version and minor version with the prefix v.

For example, v1.2.

You can follow the approach given below when you version APIs in Devant:

  • Increment the major version when you make incompatible API changes.
  • Increment the minor version when you add functionality in a backward-compatible manner.

What is Semantic Versioning?

Semantic Versioning (SemVer) is a specification that defines how to assign and increment version numbers for software products, including APIs. For more information, see Semantic Versioning specification.

One of the primary concerns when dealing with SaaS APIs is to minimize disruption for API consumers while continuously developing and deploying updates.

In compliance with SemVer, changes that don't introduce breaking or additive modifications to the API are categorized as patch updates. Hover, from the perspective of API consumers, these changes should ideally not disrupt their API clients. Typically, API consumers are most concerned with major API version alterations, but there might be instances where minor version changes are communicated to them.

Therefore, in the context of deployment tracks, API developers only need to specify the major and minor versions being delivered from a particular deployment track. This information is treated as the API version attribute of a deployment track. If the publisher requires versioning for internal tracking purposes, this can be accomplished in Git through the use of Git tags, GitHub with GitHub releases, and so forth.

Deployment tracks - api versioning