Question

A development team maintains a single Cloud Build pipeline that must deploy the same application to three GKE clusters (dev, staging, and prod) in different projects. They want to avoid maintaining three separate cloudbuild.yaml files and instead pass the target project ID, cluster name, and image tag at build-submission time without hardcoding values. As the architect, what approach should you advise the team to adopt?

Accepted Answer

Use user-defined substitution variables in the cloudbuild.yaml and pass their values with --substitutions at build submission (or via triggers).

Answer

Create three copies of the build config, one per environment, and edit the hardcoded values in each before submitting the build.

Answer

Store the environment values as build artifacts in Cloud Storage and have each build step download them at runtime.

Answer

Encode the environment-specific values directly into the container image and select behavior with a startup flag.