Automation

  • "Everything that can be automated should be automated"

    • Compare and contrast with "We value people over tools"

    • Automation always comes with costs

  • "Continuous" (on every relevant change)…

    • Integration — build and test

    • Delivery — system test in "native" environment

    • Deployment — make new release available

Systems Are Not Just Code

  • Assets

  • Databases

  • Build infrastructure

  • Configuration

  • Tests

Case Study: Enabling Rust Compiler Feature

  • Finish up with old Issue

  • Literally change a symbol from Warn to Forbid in the compiler source — about a week

  • Make the change, watch the compiler fail to compile during CI

  • Fix the problems introduced by the change iteratively

    • Relying on CI too slow, so got local build / test infrastructure working
  • Pull request edited many times

  • "Crater" run to check for problems across many, many open source Rust projects: found two significant ones that were quickly fixed

  • Finally, pull request accepted: success

  • Feature becomes part of "nightly" (dev) release, later stable release

  • Happens literally dozens of times a week on this project

CI/CD Using Cloud Containers

  • Typically Github Actions + Docker on Github (Travis CI etc available)

  • Before each release, system is automatically built and "realistically" tested

  • For services, running service is auto-updated once testing is complete

  • Software can be auto-deployed across many systems using tools like Puppet or Chef

First Steps: Github Actions

Recommend the first two Github "Learning Labs": "Github Actions: Hello World" and "Github Actions: Continuous Integration". Both are quite good.

Last modified: Wednesday, 14 October 2020, 1:30 AM