Goal

As a DevOps Engineer, I want to add manual approval points in my pipeline so that the pipeline pauses at that point and waits for a manual approval before continuing execution. Manual approvals are commonly used for approving deploying to production or modeling activities that are not automated (e.g. manual testing) in the pipeline.

In the absence of manual approval support, customers break their pipelines into multiple pipelines which adds overhead and eliminates tracking status across those pipelines as a single unit.

Manual approval is present in a wide number of CI solutions:

• Azure Pipelines
• AWS CodePipeline
• Jenkins
• Codefresh
• GitLab Pipelines
• GitHub Actions
• BitBucket Pipelines
• CircleCI
• Buildkite

Acceptance Criteria

• A TEP is available and ready for implementation that meets the following:
  • User defines a manual approval point into their pipeline
  • PipelineRuns for user's pipeline pause at the point where manual approval is defined and waits for approval
  • Once user approves the PipelineRun, the PipelineRun continues execution

Notes

• Pipeline needs to be aware of being suspended so that it doesn't time out while waiting for approval (upstream)
• The Approval process is realised in the UX and tooling that user interacts with and is downstream
• We need to discuss how to specify authorised users that can approve a pipeline and how this can be enforced