[LRUG] Continuous * (Happy New Year!)

[Gareth Adams]

Sam, I don't have a grand answer to your whole question, but a phrase leapt
out at me and I wanted to flag it:

> rebasing along the pipeline

To me, this suggests the code on your staging branch is not the same as the
code you end up deploying to production (and it might not be the same as
the code in your master branch)

I guess there are a few reasons that could be: you're storing some
environment-specific configuration on your environment branches, and can't
merge them all together, or maybe your environment branches contain a
different combination of feature branches that you're trying to keep
control of?

Either way, I'd consider how (or if) you could change your workflow to make
sure you deploy the same code everywhere (or at least deploy the same code
to production that you deploy to staging). That's the basis behind e.g.
Heroku pipelines' "Promote" button and it's the pattern I commonly see now

On Tue, 8 Jan 2019, 10:13 Samuel Joseph <tansaku at gmail.com wrote:

> Hi Gerhard,
> On 07/01/2019 12:00, Gerhard Lazu wrote:
>
> Hi Sam,
>
> What determines that a build can go from your development environment into
> staging?
>
> Good question, the answer is:
>
> 1) that all the unit, integration and acceptance tests pass
> 2) that there are no merge conflicts
> 3) that the manual sanity checks on develop are coming back okay
>
> And from staging into production? If you can capture this in code, you can
> put it into a pipeline.
>
> I don't think there's any way we can remove the manual sanity checks as
> the acceptance tests are just not that reliable, and although we've poured
> 1000's of hours into them and ultimately I can't see any way of making them
> perfect.
>
> I didn't think the presence of a manual step would prevent us using a
> pipeline, in as much as I thought of a pipeline as just being a series of
> servers with matching branches and code is them moved along them whether
> manually or automatically.  Heroku calls such things pipelines and seems to
> have no support for automatically moving code along them, it's purely
> manual from what I can see.
>
>
> Why do you have 3 pipelines?
>
> I don't think we do.  As I understand it, we have one pipeline:
>
> develop branch + develop server ---> staging branch + staging server --->
> master branch + production server
>
> That's three paired branches/servers in one pipeline.  Here's a screenshot
> of how Heroku presents our pipeline in their pipeline interface.  Note the
> button "Promote to staging" which allows you to manually move the code on
> the develop server to the staging server, but doesn't actually do a rebase
> of the code from develop branch to staging:
>
> Based on the questions that you're asking, I believe that it would help if
> you had a single pipeline.
>
> I agree - I think we do, but perhaps I'm wrong ...
>
> The question that I would focus on is *What would it take to have a
> single pipeline that has an end-goal of creating production builds*? Here
> is a pipeline example which stops after it publishes a Docker image: changelog.com,
> CircleCI
> <https://circleci.com/workflow-run/065467ef-87c0-4f5e-a2ab-5e11be12403f>.
>
> Ooh, thanks for sharing! I had to log in to CircleCI to see that:
>
> but that looks really interesting.
>
> If you are using something like Docker Swarm or Kubernetes, the
> platform/ecosystem has all the necessary tools to keep deployment concerns
> self-contained. In the changelog.com case, the Docker stack that captures
> the entire deployment has an update component that is responsible for app
> updates
> <https://github.com/thechangelog/changelog.com/blob/cf2ebe0de0f35c96bf664b8bc9183bd1f3468565/docker/changelog.stack.yml#L15-L31>.
> In this specific case, if the new app version starts and is healthy for 30
> seconds, it gets automatically promoted to live. We have been using a
> similar approach since October 2016 <http://changelog.com/podcast/254>, a
> Docker stack just makes it easier.
>
> I want to spur your imagination by sharing the pipeline that is
> responsible for RabbitMQ v3.7.x
> <https://ci.rabbitmq.com/teams/main/pipelines/server-release:v3.7.x>.
> This pipeline captures what is possible if imagination is set free:
>
> Wow, that RabbitMQ pipeline looks amazing - and I've only captured part of
> it in the screenshot:
>
>
> * tests & builds 30+ apps...
> * on all supported major runtime version...
> * and all supported OSes
> * tests upgrades
> * tests client support
> * releases alphas, betas, RCs & GAs
> * and publishes to all supported distribution channels
>
> I hope this helps, Gerhard.
>
> That's extremely helpful - thankyou!
>
> But so just to be clear, there is something in these pipelines that you're
> sharing that regularly moves code from one branch to another?  And that's
> something that CircleCI and RabbitMQ provide?  Or these are pipelines where
> the same code in the same branch is being moved through a series of
> servers, based on tests and checks passing at each server?
>
> Many thanks in advance
> Best, Sam
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