Running YAML code in Jenkins Pipeline for Environment Provisioning

Question

My company's tool stack for running a CI/CD pipeline include the following tools:

1. Jenkins - Pipeline orchestration
2. IBM UrbanCode Deploy (UCD) v6.2.6 - Application deployments
3. IBM UrbanCode Deploy Blueprint Designer - Part of the UCD suite which enables the design and provision of new environments in the cloud, and application deployments to those environments

Critically, Jenkins integrates successfully with UrbanCode Deploy which enables us to automatically orchestrate through our pipeline, the successful deployment of our applications.

Unfortunately however, Jenkins cannot integrate with UCD Blueprint Designer v6.2.6, meaning we cannot automatically orchestrate the environment provisioning via Jenkins.

This has confronted us with the following two possibilities:

1. UCD Blueprint Designer consumes some YAML files to provision our environments and one of the options we wish to explore is the capability of Jenkins to execute/run those YAML files directly. So far, I've hit a blank wall in finding a plugin or any other way that this could be achieved in Jenkins.

2. Is there a way (e.g. plugin) we could integrate Jenkins with UCD Blueprint Designer?

Thank you.

Answer 1

It looks like UCD Blueprint Designer has a REST api that is fairly easy to interact with. You can find an example on their REST api documentation page that explains how to provision an environment.

https://www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/en/SS4GSP_6.2.7/com.ibm.udeploy.reference.doc/topics/rest_api_ref_provision_example.html

It even includes the curl command to call the endpoint with the relevant data. All you need to do is wrap that up in an sh "blah" statement in a stage for provisioning.