Your responsibilities with using Continuous Delivery

Learn about the management responsibilities and terms and conditions that you have when you use IBM Cloud® Continuous Delivery. For a high-level view of the service types in IBM Cloud® and the breakdown of responsibilities between the customer and IBM for each type, see Shared responsibilities for IBM Cloud offerings.

You can integrate third-party tools (such as Public GitHub), or tools that you manage (such as a private Tekton worker that is running on your infrastructure), into Continuous Delivery toolchains. However, IBM’s management responsibilities do not extend to any tools that are managed by you or by third-parties.

Review the following sections for the specific responsibilities for you and for IBM when you use Continuous Delivery. For the overall terms of use, see IBM Cloud Terms and Notices.

Incident and operations management

Incident and operations management includes tasks such as monitoring, event management, high availability, problem determination, recovery, and full state backup and recovery.

Table 1. Responsibilities for incident and operations
Task	IBM responsibilities	Your responsibilities
Maintain high availability and respond to incidents.	Operate the Continuous Delivery service in accordance with the IBM Cloud Public Service Level Agreements (SLAs).	Plan the deployment of your apps and data to meet your availability objectives. For more information about managing availability, see How do I ensure zero downtime?

Change management

Change management includes tasks such as deployment, configuration, upgrades, patching, configuration changes, and deletion.

Table 2. Responsibilities for change management
Task	IBM responsibilities	Your responsibilities
Update Delivery Pipeline images.	Provide updated Delivery Pipeline job container images. These images might include updates to command tools (such as `ibmcloud`) that might affect the function of existing pipeline job scripts.	Update Delivery Pipeline job scripts to respond to changes in underlying container images, or configure pipeline job scripts to use specific versions of container images instead of the latest version.
Deploy apps and other workloads by using the Delivery Pipeline.	Maintain the Delivery Pipeline service.	Maintain the job scripts that are run by the Delivery Pipeline service, the inputs to pipeline job stages (such as source code), and the apps and other workloads that are deployed by job scripts.
Support Delivery Pipeline private workers to allow pipeline workloads to run on customer infrastructure.	Provide and maintain the private worker agent that integrates customer-managed infrastructure into the Delivery Pipeline service.	Install the private worker agent into your Kubernetes cluster with enough capacity to run your pipeline workloads. Update the agent as new versions become available.

Identity and access management

Identity and access management includes tasks such as authentication, authorization, access control policies, and approving, granting, and revoking access.

Table 3. Responsibilities for identity and access management
Task	IBM responsibilities	Your responsibilities
Manage access to toolchains in resource groups and their associated IBM-hosted tools, except for Git Repos and Issue Tracking.	N/A	Grant, revoke, and manage access to toolchains by using IBM Cloud Identity and Access Management (IAM). For more information about access management, see Managing user access to toolchains in resource groups.
Manage the Continuous Delivery service's access to third-party tools that are integrated into toolchains.	N/A	Add, update, or delete third-party tool integration configurations (including access credentials for tool integrations) in toolchains. For more information about working with tool integrations, see Configuring tool integrations.
Manage access to repos in Git Repos and Issue Tracking.	N/A	From the Settings > Members page in the Git Repos and Issue Tracking dashboard, manage project members and role permissions.
Manage all other access to third-party tools that are integrated with Continuous Delivery.	N/A	Manage access by using the capabilities that are provided by the third-party tools.

Security and regulation compliance

Security and regulation compliance includes tasks such as security controls implementation and compliance certification.

Table 4. Responsibilities for security and regulation compliance
Task	IBM responsibilities	Your responsibilities
Meet security and compliance objectives	Provide a secure Continuous Delivery service that complies with key standards. For more information about data security, see How do I know that my data is safe?	Secure your workloads and data. Integrate tools into your toolchains that satisfy your security and compliance requirements. To learn more about securing your cloud apps, see Security to safeguard and monitor your cloud apps. To learn more about securing your data while you are using the Continuous Delivery service, see Securing your data. To learn more about regulatory compliance with the Continuous Delivery service, see Understanding tool integrations with IBM Cloud for Financial Services.

Disaster recovery

Disaster recovery includes tasks such as providing dependencies on disaster recovery sites, provision disaster recovery environments, data and configuration backup, replicating data and configuration to the disaster recovery environment, and failover on disaster events.

IBM is responsible for maintaining backups and high availability of the Continuous Delivery service in each supported region. However, because Continuous Delivery toolchains are region-dependent, automated global failover is not supported. If a regional disaster occurs, the recovery time for toolchains depends on the recovery time for the region. You can implement manual failover to another region by creating and maintaining copies of your toolchains and Git repos that have idle pipelines, in another IBM Cloud region.

Table 5. Responsibilities for disaster recovery
Task	IBM responsibilities	Your responsibilities
Back up toolchain data.	Maintain regular backups of toolchain and pipeline definitions, Git repos, and any other toolchain integration data that is stored and managed by IBM.	To support global failover, create and maintain alternative toolchain and pipeline definitions, including tool integration data and your Git repos, in another IBM region.
Restore toolchain data.	Restore all toolchain and Git repos to the original IBM Cloud region, when that region is available.	To support global failover, manually switch to using the alternative toolchains and repos in another region.

To learn more about disaster recovery, see Continuous Delivery high availability and disaster recovery.