11.6 Artifacts and Outputs

Orbnetes deployment and release orchestration documentation for operators and platform teams.

Artifacts are persisted outputs from jobs used for downstream stages or post-run inspection.

Common artifact use cases:

  • pass build outputs to deploy job,
  • preserve logs/reports for audit,
  • store generated manifests/bundles.

Artifact model basics:

  • producer job declares artifact paths,
  • downstream jobs consume via needs.<job>.artifacts.*,
  • metadata includes file identity details (size/hash where available).

Operational benefits:

  • clearer stage contracts between jobs,
  • reduced hidden filesystem coupling,
  • reproducible handoff for rerun/incident analysis.

Best practices:

  • keep artifact set intentional (avoid dumping entire workspace),
  • define retention policy by operational need,
  • include key output identifiers in logs for quick operator context.

Run/Pipeline Operational Checklist

Before declaring execution healthy:

  1. Graph reached expected terminal state.
  2. No critical job failed or was silently optional by mistake.
  3. Live logs confirm intended command path executed.
  4. Artifacts (if required) are present and usable.
  5. Release-linked runs reflect correct source/tag/file/environment context.

This checklist keeps runtime confidence high and reduces post-deploy surprises.