Tag Archives: CI

The Ten Commandments Of Continuous Delivery

Everyone wants to implement continuous delivery. After all, the benefits are too big to be ignored. Increase the speed of delivery, increase the quality, decrease the costs, free people to dedicate time on what brings value, and so on and so forth. Those improvements are like music to any decision maker. Especially if that person has a business background. If a tech geek can articulate the benefits continuous delivery brings to the table, when he asks a business representative for a budget, the response is almost always “Yes! Do it.”

A continuous delivery project will start. Tests will be written. Builds will be scripted. Deployments will be automated. Everything will be tied into an automated pipeline and triggered on every commit. Everyone will enter a state of nirvana as soon as all that is done. There will be a huge inauguration party with a vice president having the honor to be the first one to press the button that will deploy the first release to production. Isn’t that a glorious plan everyone should be proud of?
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The DevOps Toolkit Series Are Born

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At the beginning of 2016, I published The DevOps 2.0 Toolkit. It took me a long time to finish it. Much longer than I imagined.

I started by writing blog posts in TechnologyConversations.com. They become popular and I received a lot of feedback. Through them, I clarified the idea behind the book. The goal was to provide a guide for those who want to implement DevOps practices and tools. At the same time, I did not want to write a material usable to any situation. I wanted to concentrate only on people that truly want to implement the latest and greatest practices. I hoped to make it go beyond the “traditional” DevOps. I wished to show that the DevOps movement matured and evolved over the years and that we needed a new name. A reset from the way DevOps is implemented in some organizations. Hence the name, The DevOps 2.0 Toolkit.
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The Short History of CI/CD Tools

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Jenkins (forked from Hudson after a dispute with Oracle) has been around for a long time and established itself as the leading platform for the creation of continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery/deployment (CD) pipelines. The idea behind it is that we should create jobs that perform certain operations like building, testing, deploying, and so on. Those jobs should be chained together to create a CI/CD pipeline. The success was so big that other products followed its lead and we got Bamboo, Team City, and others. They all used a similar logic of having jobs and chaining them together. Operations, maintenance, monitoring, and the creation of jobs is mostly done through their UIs. However, none of the other products managed to suppress Jenkins due to its strong community support. There are over one thousand plugins and one would have a hard time imagining a task that is not supported by, at least, one of them. The support, flexibility, and extensibility featured by Jenkins allowed it to maintain its reign as the most popular and widely used CI/CD tool throughout all this time. The approach based on heavy usage of UIs can be considered the first generation of CI/CD tools (even though there were others before).
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The DevOps 2.0 Toolkit

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Today is an exciting day for me. I just decided that the book I spent the last eight months writing is ready for general public.

What made me write the book? Certainly not the promise of wealth since, as any author of technical books will confirm, there is no money that can compensate the number of hours involved in writing a technical book. The reasons behind this endeavor are of a different nature. I realized that this blog is a great way for me to explore different subjects and share my experience with the community. However, due to the format, blog posts do not give enough space to explore, in more details, subjects I’m passionate about so, around eight months ago, I decided to start working on The DevOps 2.0 Toolkit: Automating the Continuous Deployment Pipeline with Containerized Microservices book. It treats similar subjects as those I write about in this blog, but with much more details. More importantly, the book allowed me to organize my experience into a much more coherent story.

The book is about different techniques that help us architect software in a better and more efficient way with microservices packed as immutable containers, tested and deployed continuously to servers that are automatically provisioned with configuration management tools. It’s about fast, reliable and continuous deployments with zero-downtime and ability to roll-back. It’s about scaling to any number of servers, designing self-healing systems capable of recuperation from both hardware and software failures and about centralized logging and monitoring of the cluster.

In other words, this book envelops the whole microservices development and deployment lifecycle using some of the latest and greatest practices and tools. We’ll use Docker, Kubernetes, Ansible, Ubuntu, Docker Swarm and Docker Compose, Consul, etcd, Registrator, confd, Jenkins, and so on. We’ll go through many practices and, even more, tools.

At this moment, around 70% is finished and you’ll receive regular updates if you decide to purchase the book. The truth is that my motivation for writing the book is the same as with this blog. I like sharing my experience and this book is one more way to accomplish that. You can set your own price and if you feel that the minimum amount is still too high, please send me a private message and I’ll get back to you with a free copy.

Please give The DevOps 2.0 Toolkit: Automating the Continuous Deployment Pipeline with Containerized Microservices a try and let me know what you think. Any feedback is welcome and appreciated.

Continuous Integration, Delivery or Deployment with Jenkins, Docker and Ansible

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This article tries to provide one possible way to set up the Continuous Integration, Delivery or Deployment pipeline. We’ll use Jenkins, Docker, Ansible and Vagrant to set up two servers. One will be used as a Jenkins server and the other one as an imitation of production servers. First one will checkout, test and build applications while perform deployment and post-deployment tests.
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Continuous Deployment: Implementation

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This article is part of the Continuous Integration, Delivery and Deployment series.

The previous article described several Continuous Deployment strategies. In this one we will attempt to provide one possible solution for reliable, fast and automatic continuous deployment with ability to test new releases before they become available to general users. If something goes wrong we should be able to rollback back easily. On top of that, we’ll try to accomplish zero-downtime. No matter how many times we deploy our applications, there should never be a single moment when they are not operational.
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Feature Toggles (Feature Switches or Feature Flags) vs Feature Branches

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This article is part of the Continuous Integration, Delivery and Deployment series.

Feature Branches

If you are using branches, you are not doing Continuous Integration/Deployment/Delivery!

You might have great Code Coverage with unit tests, you might be doing TDD, you might have functional and integrations tests written in BDD format and you might run all of them on every commit to the repository. However, if you are having branches, integration is delayed until they are merged and that means that there is no continuous integration.
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BDD (Behavior-Driven Development): Missing Piece in the Continuous Integration Puzzle

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This article is part of the Continuous Integration, Delivery and Deployment series.

Behavior-Driven Development (BDD) is a process or it can be a tool. In many cases, BDD is both. However, it should not be a goal in itself. The goal of software development is to deliver quality as fast and as cheap as possible. The only real measure of quality is whether it fulfills user needs in a reliable manner. The best way we can take to accomplish that goal is through continuous integration, deployment and delivery. For the sake of this article I will ignore the differences between those three and refer to all of them as continuous integration or CI.
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Continuous Delivery: Unit Tests

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This article is part of the Continuous Integration, Delivery and Deployment series.

In the previous article we explored static analysis as one of the first steps in Continuous Delivery. Our journey will continue with unit tests.

Unit Tests

Unit tests are probably the most important part of Continuous Delivery. While unit tests cannot substitute integration and functional tests, they are very easy to write and should be very fast to execute. As any other type of tests, each unit test should be independent of each other. What differentiates unit from other types of tests (integration, functional) is the scope. Each unit test should verify only a single unit of code (method, class, etc). Main benefit of unit tests are that they can find problems early due to their speed of execution. When ease of writing is combined with very short execution time it is no wonder that unit test often represent biggest part of automated tests.
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Continuous Delivery: Static Analysis

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This article is part of the Continuous Integration, Delivery and Deployment series.

The previous article CI Tools Setup ended with Jenkins up and running waiting for us to use it. Travis, on the other hand, was left aside and soon we’ll see why.

In this article we’ll explore static analysis as the first type of tasks that we should do in our delivery pipeline. Since that is our starting point, let’s go through the brief explanation.
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