Until now, serial groups could only serialize one job at a time — there was no built-in way to keep other pipelines from slipping in between a set of jobs that needed to run together. Many teams worked around this using the Queue Orb, which repeatedly polls the CircleCI API and burns credits while waiting.
Now you can define job groups — a named set of jobs that run as one unit. When serialized with serial-group, no other pipeline can start the same serial group until all jobs in it finish.
Job groups are defined under a new top-level job-groups key. You can use them with or without serial-group — without it, they’re just a way to organize and reuse a set of jobs.
Note: Rerunning any job in a serial group reruns the entire group — including “Rerun job with SSH,” which will enable SSH for all jobs in the group, not just the one you selected.
See our documentation for details.