[LRUG] Continuous * (Happy New Year!)

[Sasha Gerrand]

You're referring to "continuous deployment", which many service providers
like Heroku offer (Heroku call it "pipelines").

Note that an automatic deployment of code to a staging environment needs
additional steps to validate that the chances are behaving as expected.
Ditto for the production deployment (s).

On Mon., 7 Jan. 2019, 20:52 Samuel Joseph <tansaku at gmail.com wrote:

> Hi LRUG,
>
> Happy New Year!  Hope you all had a good one.
>
> Apologies in advance for what has become a bit of a long post, but I
> have a question about "Continuous *", i.e.
>
> * Continous Integration (C.I.)
> * Continous Deployment
> * Continous Delivery
>
> I think I understand Continuous Integration quite well.  I take it to
> mean that all tests are run whenever you commit code to version
> repositories in the cloud, and thus we talk about C.I. providers such as
> Travis, Semaphore, CircleCI, CodeShip etc.   I interact with Travis and
> Semaphore on a daily basis and see the results of automated tests run on
> all our pull requests and again when we merge them in.  I think
> technically the concept of C.I. originally means just having all
> developers getting their work merged in to the same place with high
> frequency, but anyway, I feel relatively comfortable with this term.
>
> The way I hear Continuous Deployment being used seems to be when the
> C.I. tests are set such that on a passing build, the code gets
> automatically deployed to a server.   We have a few pipelines where we
> have develop, staging and production servers, which are automatically
> deployed to as a result of passing builds on the develop, staging and
> master branches respectively.  These deployments are supported by hooks
> on Travis, Semaphore etc. and are very handy.  Continous Delivery I'm
> not so sure - I just found the term of google
>
> Of course I have read the wikipedia pages on all these terms:
>
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuous_integration
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuous_deployment
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuous_delivery
>
> and while I'd love to tune up my mental pictures of each, what I'm
> really looking for the right term for the practise of automatically
> moving code along a pipeline like the one I mentioned above: develop -->
> staging --> production.
>
> At the moment the process of running tests and deploying to each server
> for each branch is completely automatic.  However, the process of moving
> code from develop to staging, or staging to production is manual.  We've
> previously reached out to Travis, Semaphore and Heroku to ask about some
> process that would automate moves along the pipeline, but the
> conversation seems confused by the ambiguity in the technology and I'm
> left thinking they don't - but could be wrong.
>
> We've recenly moved one pipeline completely from heroku to azure/dokku
> and it seems like we can now create our own automatic pipeline
> progression with cron jobs so that, say, on Monday at noon, the develop
> code is rebased into staging, and at noon on wednesday the staging code
> is rebased into production, and in each cases tests and deploys would be
> kicked off.   My main motivation to automate this is to remove the
> manual step which is a chore and can get put off.  It's particularly
> highlighted by our use of dependabot, which is automatically putting in
> PRs based on library upgrades, so every week there is a several upgrades
> to go out along with the usual features and bug-fixes.
>
> I speculate that if we had such a setup, we'd get into the habit of
> being more careful with merging PRs (knowing they'd be automatically
> deployed to production) and regularly doing the few additional front end
> manual sanity checks when we're notified of staging and production
> deploys ...  Anyway, I'd love to know if there's a correct term to be
> using to describe the pipeline automation we want to set up, and whether
> there are any providers that make it easy to do.
>
> We hear all the time about facebook, netflix etc. deploying to
> production multiple times a day, but I'm very interested to hear about
> practices at all scales.  Sorry for the long post - here's wishing
> everyone a very prosperous 2019!
>
> Best, Sam
>
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