I'm using GCE in my project. For infrastructure release I have used both terraform and puppet. Each of them have advantages and disadvantages. But both of them falls behind(with upgrading new functionality) compared with Google Deployment Manager and of course if I use only google(not multi-cloud) then it is the best solution for me to use native tools ). As puppet is a declarative tool, it allows anytime declare my infrastructure and any manual change should be reseted.
I am trying to write a script which will reset all manual changes that I made in my project. Of course manual changes is not the best practice, but sometimes it is the fastest way for hotfix (e.g changing the minimum count of instances in group for a critical moment).
Is there a way to perform the same functional in Google Deployment Manager.
Related
I have scoured the internet to find out what I can on this, but have come away short. I need to know two things.
Firstly, is there a best practice for how TFS & Team Build should be used in a Development > Test > Production environment? I currently have my local VS get the latest files. Then I work on them & check them in. This creates a build that then pushes the published files into a location on the test server which IIS references. This creates my test environment. I wonder then what is the best practice for deploying this to a Live environment once testing is complete?
Secondly, off the back of the previous - my web application is connected to a database. So, the test version will point to a test database. But when this is then tested and put live, I will need that process to also make sure that any data connections are changed to the live database.
I am pretty much doing all this from scratch and am learning as I go along.
I'd suggest you to look at Microsoft Release Management since it's the tool that can help you to do exactly the things you mentioned. It can also be integrated with TFS.
In general, release management is:
the process of managing, planning, scheduling and controlling a
software build through different stages and environments; including
testing and deploying software releases.
Specifically, the tool that Microsoft offers would enable you to automate the release process, from development to production, keeping track of what and how everything is done when a particular stage is reached.
There's an MSDN article, Automate deployments with Release Management, that gives a good overview:
Basically, for each release path, you can define your own stages, each one made of a workflow (the so-called deployment sequence) containing the activities you want to perform using pre-defined machines from a pool.
It's possible to insert manual interventions/approvals if necessary, and the whole thing can be triggered automatically once your build is done.
Since you are pretty much in control of the actions performed on each machine in each stage (through the use of built-in or custom actions/components) it is also certainly possible to change configuration files, for example to test different scenarios, etc..
Another image to give you and idea of how it can be done:
We are 5 developers working today with 1 database.
We have always one ASYNC service working in order to allow debugging, it means that when a developer wants to debug async, he announce to the others that he is hijacking the async service to his machine till he finishes the debugging.
We want to switch to a database per developer, there are a lot of issues with that, for example syncing schema changes / solutions with other programmers/
What is the best practice with large team of developers, is there any tool / methodology that is best for large teams.
Also, in general, what is the best practice for large teams developing Dynamic CRM 2011.
Thanks
Typically, I have worked/advised the following:
All devs work on their own virtual system. Much easier debugging. No trampling on or coordinating with others. I use VirtualBox.
Work is exported (unmanaged solutions) into a common build system.
Work is merged into the relevant managed solution(s) in build.
Managed solution(s) exported from build and applied to test / uat / pre-production etc.
Managed solution(s) applied to production environment.
Highly recommended reference: Microsoft released a very thorough whitepaper on Lifecycle management. Read about it here.
A typical development flow could be
Developers develop against their own personal development organization (Online/On-premise), in a solution with the same publisher / name
They export the developer solution
They unpack the zip file into the XML structure
And check it into source control, merging it with the master version
A typical deployment into the integration organization could be
Get a latest version of the XML structure from source control
Package it into a .zip solution
Import it into the integration organization
This way, you have a full history of all changes, linked to the developers, and you can make controlled merges, using merging tools you're familiar with.
A developer can always get a latest version from source control, package it and deploy it in his own development organization.
I Develop one website using magento. How to i Publish on server? If asp.net after publishing
codes are converted into dll . but here magento How It work? How i configure my own website?
Thanks in Advance...
There are a number of ways to do this. From simplest to most complex:
Simple zip and unpack on the server. Migrate databases with mysqldumps.
Push files with an FTP program. Preferably one with a compare viewer, such as Beyond Compare
If you utilize a QA environment or a staging site on the same box or a local server you can utilize rsync to push changes from one directory to another.
Create a source-control repository and use your production site root as a checkout of your Magento application (probably your best bet for ease of use).
Utilize source-control but deploy with a build tool such as Apache Ant.
Implement continuous integration with a tool such as Capistrano, Hudson/Jenkins, or CruiseControl
You really want to be using source control anyhow - so deploying straight from SVN/Git/Hg or another tool makes the most sense as it is easiest to manage and requires very little effort on your part. Making your repository publicly accessible can be as easy as using a free service such as GitHub or Beanstalkapp. Paid levels give you private repos or more than one user.
Continuous integration will be your best bet for rapid deployment on a site that is changing quickly and many deployments happen daily. Some comparison of tools:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Continuous_Integration_Software
I hope that helps. I have deployed Magento using all of the above methods. There really is no elegant way to push databases around outside of using upgrade scripts in local modules. You can use tools like Maatkit to diff tables or in some extreme situations I've seen developers alternate between qa and production environments using Magento's built-in table prefixes.
I decided to use the following pattern after reading semantic versioning at http://semver.org/. However, I have some unsolved issues in my mind in terms of automaticng and integrating SDLC tools.
Version Pattern:
major.minor.revision.build
Such that;
Major: major changes, should be increamented manually.
Minor: minor changes, should be increamented automatically, whenever a new feature or an enhancement to existing feature is solved in issue tracking system.
Revision: changes not affecting the minor changes, should be increamented automatically, whenever a bug is solved in issue tracking system.
Assume that developers never commit the source unless an issue has been solved in issue tracking system, and the issue tracking system is JIRA in this configuration. This means that there are bugs, improvements, and new features as issue types by default, apart from the tasks.
Furthermore, I am adding a continous integration tool in this configuration, and assume that it is bamboo (by the way, I never used bamboo before, I used Hudson), and I am using Eclipse IDE with mylyn plugin and plus the project is a Maven project (web).
Now, I want to elucidate what I want to do by illustrating following scenario. Analyst (A) opens an issue (I), which is a new feature, related to Maven project (P). As a developer (D), I receive an email about the issue, and I open the task via Mylyn interface in Eclipse. I understand and develop the new feature related to issue (I). Consider, I am a Test Driven Development oriented developer, thus I wrote the Unit, DBUnit, and User-Acceptance (for example using Selenium) tests correspondingly. Finally, I commit the changes to the source control. I think the rest should be cycled automatically but I don't know how can I achieve this? The auto-cycled part is the following:
The Source Control System should have a post-hook script that triggers the Continous integration tool to build the project (P). While building, in the proper phase the test code should be run, and their reports generated. The user-acceptance test should be performed in a dedicated server (For example, jboss, or Tomcat). The order of this acceptance test should be, up the server, run the UA test, then generate the UA test reports and down the server. If all these steps have been successfuly completed, the versioning should be performed. In versioning part, the Maven plugin, or what so ever, should take the number of issues solved from the Issue Tracking System, and increment the related version fragments (minor and revision), at last appends the build number. The fragments of the version may be saved in manifest file in order to show it in User Interface. Last but not the least, the CI tool should deploy it in Test environment. That's all auto-cycled processes I want.
The deployment of the artifact to the production environment should be done automatically or manually?
Let's start with the side question: On the automatic deployment to production, this requires the sign off of "the business" whomever that is. How good do your tests need to be to automatically push to production? Are they good enough that you trust things to just go live? What's your downtime? Is that acceptable? If your tests miss something, can you rollback? Are you monitoring production so you know if you've introduced problems? Generally, the answers to enough of these questions is negative enough that you can't auto-deploy there as the result of a build / autotest event.
As for the tracking, you'll need a few things. You'll need all your assumptions to be true (which I doubt they are, but if you get there that's awesome). You'll also need a build number that can be incremented after build time based on test results. You'll need source changes to be annotated with bug ids. You'll need the build system to parse the source changes and make associations with issues. You'll need an API into the build system so you can get the count of issues associated with the build. Finally you'll need your own bit of scripting to do the query and update the build number accordingly.
That's totally doable, but is it really worth having? What's the value you attach to the numbering scheme?
I've been dealing with the problem of scaling CI at my company and at the same time trying to figure out which approach to take when it comes to CI and multiple branches. There is a similar question at stackoverflow, Multiple feature branches and continuous integration. I've started a new one because I'd like to get more of discussion and provide some analysis in the question.
So far I've found that there are 2 main approaches that I can take (or maybe some others???).
Multiple set of jobs (talking about Jenkins/Hudson here) per branch
Write tooling to manage the extra jobs
Create/modify/delete Jobs in bulk
Custom settings for each job per branch (SCM url, dep management repos duplications)
Some examples of people tackling this problem with shell tools, ant scripts and Jenkins CLI. See:
http://jenkins.361315.n4.nabble.com/Multiple-branches-best-practice-td2306578.html
http://jenkins.361315.n4.nabble.com/Is-it-possible-to-handle-multiple-branches-where-some-jobs-should-run-on-each-one-without-duplicatin-td954729.html
http://jenkins.361315.n4.nabble.com/Parallel-development-with-branches-td1013013.html
Configure or Create hudson job automatically
Will cause more load on your CI cluster
Feedback cycle for devs slows down (if the infrastructure cannot handle the new load)
Multiple set of jobs per 2 branches (dev & stable)
Manage the two sets manually (if you change the conf of a job then be sure to change in the other branch)
PITA but at least so few to manage
Other extra branches won't get a full test suite before they get pushed to dev
Unsatisfied devs. Why should a dev care about CI scaling problems. He has a simple request, when I branch I would like to test my code. Simple.
So it seems if I want to provide devs with CI for their own custom branches I need special tooling for Jenkins (API or shellscripts or something?) and handle scaling. Or I can tell them to merge more often to DEV and live without CI on custom branches. Which one would you take or are there other options?
When you talk about scaling CI you're really talking about scaling the use of your CI server to handle all your feature branches along with your mainline. Initially this looks like a good approach as the developers in a branch get all the advantages of the automated testing that the CI jobs include. However, you run into problems managing the CI server jobs (like you have discovered) and more importantly, you aren't really doing CI. Yes, you are using a CI server, but you aren't continuously integrating the code from all of your developers.
Performing real CI means that all of your developers are committing regularly to the mainline. Easy to say, but the hard part is doing it without breaking your application. I highly recommend you look at Continuous Delivery, especially the Keeping Your Application Releasable section in Chapter 13: Managing Components and Dependencies. The main points are:
Hide new functionality until it's finished (A.K.A Feature Toggles).
Make all changes incrementally as a series of small changes, each of which is releasable.
Use branch by abstraction to make large-scale changes to the codebase.
Use components to decouple parts of your application that change at different rates.
They are pretty self explanatory except branch by abstraction. This is just a fancy term for:
Create an abstraction over the part of the system that you need to change.
Refactor the rest of the system to use the abstraction layer.
Create a new implementation, which is not part of the production code path until complete.
Update your abstraction layer to delegate to your new implementation.
Remove the old implementation.
Remove the abstraction layer if it is no longer appropriate.
The following paragraph from the Branches, Streams, and Continuous Integration section in Chapter 14: Advanced Version Control summarises the impacts.
The incremental approach certainly requires more discipline and care - and indeed more creativity - than creating a branch and diving gung-ho into re-architecting and developing new functionality. But it significantly reduces the risk of your changes breaking the application, and will save your and your team a great deal of time merging, fixing breakages, and getting your application into a deployable state.
It takes quite a mind shift to give up feature branches and you will always get resistance. In my experience this resistance is based on developers not feeling safe committing code the the mainline and this is a reasonable concern. This in turn usually stems from a lack of knowledge, confidence or experience with the techniques listed above and possibly with the lack of confidence with your automated tests. The former can be solved with training and developer support. The latter is a far more difficult problem to deal with, however branching doesn't provide any extra real safety, it just defers the problem until the developers feel confident enough with their code.
I would set up separate jobs for each branch. I've done this before and it isn't hard to manage and set up if you've set up Hudson/Jenkins correctly. A quick way to create multiple jobs is to copy from an existing job that has similar requirements and modify them as needed. I'm not sure if you want to allow each developer to setup their own jobs for their own branches, but it isn't much work for one person (i.e. a build manager) to manage. Once the custom branches have been merged into stable branches, corresponding jobs can be removed when they are no longer necessary.
If you're worried about the load on the CI server, you could set up separate instances of the CI or even separate slaves to help balance the load across multiple servers. Make sure that the server you are running Hudson/Jenkins on is adequate. I've used Apache Tomcat and just had to ensure that it had enough memory and processing power to process the build queue.
It's important to be clear on what you want to achieve using CI and then figure out a way to implement it without much manual effort or duplication. There's nothing wrong with using other external tools or scripts that are executed by your CI server that help simplify your overall build management process.
I would choose dev+stable branches. And if you still want custom branches and afraid of the load, then why not move these custom ones to the cloud and let developers manage it themselves, e.g. http://cloudbees.com/dev.cb
This is the company where Kohsuke is now.
There is an Eclipse Tooling also, so if you are on Eclipse, you will have it tightly integrated right into dev env.
Actually what is really problematic is build isolation with feature branches. In our company we have a set of separate maven projects all be part of a larger distribution. These projects are maintained by different teams but for each distribution all projects need to be released. A featurebranch may now overlap from one project to another and thats when build isolation gets painfully. There are several solutions we've tried:
create separate snapshot repositories in nexus for each feature branch
share local repositories on dedicated slaves
use the repository-server-plugin with upstream repositories
build all within one job with one private repository
As a matter of fact, the last solution is the most promising. All other solutions lack in one or another way. Together with the job-dsl plugin it is easy to setup a new feature branch. simply copy and paste the groovy script, adapt branches and let the seed job create the new jobs. Make sure that the seed job removes nonmanaged jobs. Then you can easily scale with feature branches over different maven projects.
But as tom said well above, it would be nicer to overcome the necessity of feature branches and teach devs to integrate cleanly, but that is a longer process and the outcome is not clear with many legacy system parts you won't touch any more.
my 2 cents