---
name: ContinuousDelivery-cd-architecture-workload-isolation
title: Learning about Continuous Delivery and workload isolation
description: IBM Cloud® Continuous Delivery is offered as a regional, shared, multi-tenant service with public endpoints. This service is composed of several major components. Most of these components are fully IBM-managed, and most support a shared compute, network, and physical storage model.
last-updated: 2026-08-13
---

> ## Documentation Index
> The table of contents for this documentation set is at https://cloud.ibm.com/docs/ContinuousDelivery?format=markdown
> The index for all IBM Cloud docs is at: https://cloud.ibm.com/docs/llms.txt
> Use these files to discover more information as needed.

# Learning about Continuous Delivery and workload isolation
{: #cd-compute-isolation}

DevOps Insights will reach end of service and be discontinued on **August 31, 2026**. Continuous Delivery will be discontinued in the following regions on 12 February 2027: **au-syd**, **ca-tor**, **us-east**. Code Risk Analyzer will also be discontinued in all regions on that date. If a region has no active usage of these features, the features in that region may be discontinued earlier and stop accepting new instances. [Learn more](https://cloud.ibm.com/docs/ContinuousDelivery?topic=ContinuousDelivery-faq_region_feature_consolidation&format=markdown)
{: important}

IBM Cloud® Continuous Delivery is offered as a regional, shared, multi-tenant service with public endpoints. This service is composed of several major components. Most of these components are fully IBM-managed, and most support a shared compute, network, and physical storage model.
{: shortdesc}

The following table lists the major components of the Continuous Delivery service, who manages each component, and the compute, network, and storage isolation characteristics of each component.

| Component | Manager | Isolation characteristics|
|:-----------------|:-----------------|:-----------------|
| Toolchain platform | IBM | Shared, compute, network, and storage |
| Third-party tool integrations | IBM | Shared, compute, network, and storage |
| Git Repos and Issue Tracking | IBM | Shared, compute, network, and storage |
| DevOps Insights| IBM | Shared, compute, network, and storage |
| Delivery Pipeline | IBM | Shared, compute, network, and storage |
| Delivery Pipeline shared workers | IBM | Each pipeline job or step runs in isolation, in its own container, on a pool of IBM-managed shared worker nodes with shared network and storage. |
| Delivery Pipeline private workers | You | Each pipeline job or step runs in isolation, in its own container on worker nodes that you manage, supported by network and storage that you define or manage. |
{: caption="Service component management" caption-side="top"}

Delivery Pipeline jobs and steps run directly within containers on shared (IBM-managed) or private (customer-managed) Kubernetes worker nodes. All other components of the Continuous Delivery service are deployed as microservices within IBM-managed Kubernetes clusters. These components are logically partitioned across a set of clusters. Each set of clusters is replicated across three zones in each region in which the Continuous Delivery service is available.

![Continuous Delivery clusters](images/CD_cluster_arch.svg){: caption="Continuous Delivery clusters" caption-side="bottom"}
 
For more information about availability, see [High availability and disaster recovery](https://cloud.ibm.com/docs/ContinuousDelivery?topic=ContinuousDelivery-ha-dr&format=markdown).
 
All Continuous Delivery service plans share management, isolation, and deployment characteristics. For more information about the Continuous Delivery plans, see [Plan limitations and usage](https://cloud.ibm.com/docs/ContinuousDelivery?topic=ContinuousDelivery-limitations_usage&format=markdown).
{: tip}

You can configure Delivery Pipeline Private Workers to communicate between customer clusters and Delivery Pipeline services by using [private endpoints](https://cloud.ibm.com/docs/ContinuousDelivery?topic=ContinuousDelivery-install-private-workers&format=markdown#install_pw_agent_pse).

## Continuous Delivery workload isolation
{: #cd-workload-isolation}

The IBM-managed components of the Continuous Delivery service are organized to provide compute isolation between the multi-tenant toolchain platform workloads and the single tenant Delivery Pipeline worker workloads of the service.

The following diagram shows the management and isolation characteristics of the Continuous Delivery service components.

* The **Multi-tenant toolchain platform** section represents the IBM-managed components of the service that provide multi-tenant, or shared, workloads.
* The **Container level compute workload isolation** section represents the IBM-managed Delivery Pipeline shared workers component of the service. This component supports single tenant workloads.
* The multi-tenant and single tenant workloads each run in different sets of clusters, and are compute-isolated from each other.
* Each Delivery Pipeline job or step runs in its own container that is compute-isolated from the other containers within a cluster. This isolation applies to both IBM-managed shared workers and customer-managed shared workers.

![Continuous Delivery compute workloads](images/CD_Compute_Arch.png){: caption="Continuous Delivery compute workloads" caption-side="bottom"}

## Continuous Delivery dependencies
{: #cd-dependencies}

The Continuous Delivery service depends on several IBM Cloud Platform components and services that include, but are not limited to, the following tasks.

* Hosting the internal microservices of the Continuous Delivery service
* Integrating into the IBM Cloud Platform and user interface
* Storing service and customer-owned data
* Logging and auditing service events
* Backing up service and customer data regularly

The following table lists the main dependencies of the Continuous Delivery service.

The Continuous Delivery service launches its dependencies over public endpoints.
{: tip}

| Dependency | Type | Purpose|
|:-----------------|:-----------------|:-----------------|
| Console | Platform | Enables users to manage Continuous Delivery service instances and toolchains by way of a web UI. Handles user login for most Continuous Delivery service web pages. |
| Identity and Access Management (IAM) | Platform | Provides authorization checks to Continuous Delivery and toolchain resources and actions. Generates and authenticates IAM API keys such as those that are used by the Delivery Pipeline component. |
| Search and tagging | Platform | Provides cached, high performance lookup of resources. |
| Resource controller | Platform | Coordinates the provisioning, updating, and de-provisioning of Continuous Delivery and toolchain resources. |
| Account management | Platform | Provides metadata about IBM Cloud accounts and enterprises that Continuous Delivery uses in the computation of usage metrics. |
| Usage metering | Platform | Receives usage metrics from the Continuous Delivery service to report usage and compute bills for customer accounts. |
| IBM Cloud® Kubernetes Service | Service | Hosts clusters of containers in which the internal microservices of the Continuous Delivery service run. |
| IBM Cloud® Container Registry | Service | Stores container images that are used by Delivery Pipeline jobs and steps. |
| IBM Cloud Logs | Service | Collects internal log events from the Continuous Delivery service for use by IBM specialists in maintaining and supporting the service. |
| IBM Cloud Activity Tracker Event Routing  | Platform | Collects action events from the Continuous Delivery service so that customers can audit activities with the Continuous Delivery service and its components. |
| IBM Cloud® App ID  | Service | Manages conversions between IBM Cloud user IDs and user email addresses. |
| IBM Cloud® Internet Services (CIS)  | Service | Provides domain name resolution and traffic routing for the Continuous Delivery service. |
| IBM® Cloudant® for IBM Cloud®  | Service | Serves as the primary database for all structured Continuous Delivery service and customer-owned data. |
| IBM Cloud® Databases for Redis  | Service | Provides a shared in-memory cache service for high-speed data sharing among replicas of the microservices that make up the Continuous Delivery service. |
| IBM Cloud® Messages for RabbitMQ  | Service | Provides reliable delivery of messages between components of the Continuous Delivery service that include, but are not limited to, Delivery Pipeline triggers. |
| IBM Cloud® Databases for PostgreSQL  | Service | Serves as the database for Delivery Pipeline job and step logs. |
| Object Storage  | Service | Stores artifacts that are produced by Delivery Pipeline jobs and steps. Stores backups of Continuous Delivery data. |
| QRadar  | Service | Collects security events such as successful or failed login authorization attempts for use by IBM specialists who maintain and support the service. |
| General Parallel File System (GPFS)  | Storage | Provides secure, high-performance distributed file system storage of Git Repos and Issue Tracking repositories. GPFS runs on nodes within the same clusters that host the Git Repos and Issue Tracking components. |
{: caption="Continuous Delivery dependencies" caption-side="top"}

See [What is the IBM Cloud Platform?](https://cloud.ibm.com/docs/overview?topic=overview-whatis-platform&format=markdown) for more details about key platform components. 

The following diagram shows the Continuous Delivery dependencies.

![Continuous Delivery dependencies](images/CD_Dependencies_Arch.svg){: caption="Continuous Delivery dependencies" caption-side="bottom"}

Excluding data backups, customer-owned data that is provided to the Continuous Delivery service in a specific region is exchanged only with data and logging services in the same region. Data backups are stored in Cloud Object Storage cross-region buckets.

### Object storage location
{: #cd-object-storage}

The following table shows the cross-region location for Object Storage in which backup data is stored for each Continuous Delivery service region.

|Continuous Delivery service location |Object Storage backup service location	|
|:----------|:------------------------------|
| Dallas (us-south)		|US Cross Region (Dallas, Washington, San Jose) 		|
| Washington (us-east)		|US Cross Region (Dallas, Washington, San Jose)   |
| London (eu-gb)		|EU Cross Region (Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Milan)		|
| Frankfurt	(eu-de)	|EU Cross Region (Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Milan)		|
| Tokyo (jp-tok)		|AP Cross Region (Osaka, Sydney, Tokyo)		|
| Sydney (au-syd)		|AP Cross Region (Osaka, Sydney, Tokyo)		|
| Toronto (ca-tor)	|US Cross Region (Dallas, Washington, San Jose, Toronto) 		|
| Sao Paulo (br-sao)|US Cross Region (Dallas, Washington, San Jose, Toronto, Sao Paulo) 		|
{: caption="Object Storage location" caption-side="top"}

For more information about Object Storage locations, see [Regional Endpoints](https://cloud.ibm.com/docs/cloud-object-storage?topic=cloud-object-storage-endpoints&format=markdown#endpoints-region).

For more information about Continuous Delivery disaster recovery, see [Disaster recovery](https://cloud.ibm.com/docs/ContinuousDelivery?topic=ContinuousDelivery-responsibilities-cd&format=markdown#disaster-recovery).