We are building a Microservices based architecture and we are having 50 odd CI and 50 odd CD pipelines. Is there a way to script the CI / CD Build and Release definitions? We want this to be a repeatable process and do not want to leave it to our DevOps engineer(s) as it is prone to errors. Please note that I am not talking about ARM (which is already being used by us). Is there a way to do the above?
For builds, you can use YAML builds, which are currently in preview.
For releases, there's nothing equivalent yet.
You could always use the REST APIs to extract the build and release definitions as JSON, source control them, and then create a continuous delivery pipeline to update them when the definitions in source control change.
Related
I have notified the complexity of my configuration for Gitlab CI/CD grows fairly fast. Normally, in a either a programming language or infrastructure code I could write automated test for the code.
Is it possible to write automated test for the gitlab-ci.yml file itself?
Does it exist any library or testing framework for it?
Ideally I would like to setup the different environments variables, execute the gitlab-ci.yml file, and do assertions on the output.
I am not aware of any tool currently to really test behaviour. But i ended up with two approaches:
1. testing in smaller chunks aka unit testing my building blocks.
I extracted my builds into smaller chunks which i can include, and test seperately. This works fine for script blocks etc. but is not really sufficient for rule blocks - but offers great value, eg i use the templates for some steps as verification for the generated docker image, which will be used by those steps.
2. verification via gitlab-ci-local
https://github.com/firecow/gitlab-ci-local is a tool which allows you to test it locally, and which allows you to provide environment variables. There are some minor issues with branch name resolution in pr pipelines but besides that it works great. I use it to test gitlab ci files in GitHub Actions.
I hope that this helps somehow
Gitlab have a linter for gitlab-ci.yaml
To access the CI Lint tool, navigate to CI/CD > Pipelines or CI/CD > Jobs in your project and click CI lint.
Docs
For my team where we have partner teams providing us SW pieces that need to be integrated on HW systems and tested together, our code footprint is small and hence churn is small, while number of changes from partner teams is frequent. In such a scenario, I see the need to trigger the release part of the yaml many more times than the build part. Is multi-stage pipelines the way to go? I want to trigger new release instances using RestAPI invoke only the Release stages on the YAML file, using AzureDevOps Rest API.
Regards,
You don't have to use multi-stage pipelines to be able to trigger repeated releases, it just makes the management of the pipeline cleaner.
It's possible to create a pipeline that include a build stage and release stages for each of your environments, trigger the build stage (manually or based on a CI trigger), and then from that Pipeline "Run", deploy as many times as you see fit to whatever environments you like. That can be done from API or portal.
It's also possible to create a pipeline that is "release-only" - that is, it gets created manually, or as the result of seeing a specified build having been run.
Personally, I like the multi-stage build because it's a little easier to see what build created the release that you're deploying around. It's not a requirement, though.
I have a VSTS project and I'm setting up CI/CD at the moment. All fine, but I seem to have 2 options for the publishing step:
Option 1: it's a task as part of the CI Build, e.g. see build step 3 here:
https://medium.com/#flu.lund/setting-up-a-ci-pipeline-for-deploying-your-angular-application-to-azure-using-visual-studio-team-f686c8f190cf
Option 2: The build phase produces artifacts, and as part of a separate release phase these artifacts are published, see here:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/vsts/build-release/actions/ci-cd-part-1?view=vsts
Both options seem well supported in the MS documentation, is one of these options better than the other? Or is it a case of pros & cons for each and it depends on circumstances, etc?
Thanks!
You should definitely use "Option 2". Your build should not make changes in your environments whatsoever, that is strictly what a "release" is. That link you have under "Option 1" is the wrong way to do it, a build should be just that, compiling code and making artifacts, not actually deploying code.
When you mesh build/releases together, you make it very difficult to debug build issues. Since your code is always being released, you really have to disable the "deploy" step to get any idea of what was built before you deployed.
Also, the nice thing about creating an artifact is you have a deployable package, and if in the future you need to rollback to a previous working version, you have that ready to go. Using the "build only" strategy, you'd have to revert your code or make unnecessary backups to achieve this.
I think you'll find any new Microsoft documentation pointing you toward this approach, and VSTS is completely set up like this. Even the "Configure Continuous Delivery in Azure..." feature in Visual Studio 2017 will create a build and a release.
Almost all build tasks are the same as release tasks, so you can deploy the app after building the project in build process.
Also there are many differences between release and build, for example, many environments, deployment group phase in release.
So which way is better is per to your detail requirement, for example, if build > deploy > other process is simple, you can do it just in build.
Regarding Publish artifact task, it is used to publish the files to VSTS server or other place (e.g. shared folder), which can be used in release as Artifact (Click Add artifact > Build in release definition), you also can download them for troubleshooting, for example, if you are using Hosted Agent that you can’t access, but you want to get some files (e.g. build result), you can add publish artifact task to publish to VSTS server, then download them (Open build result > Artifacts)
We have currently released our code to Production, and as a result have cut and branched to ensure we can support our current release, whilst still supporting hot-fixes without breaking the current release from any on-going development.
Here is our current structure:
Project-
/Development
/RC1
Until recently using Octopus we have had the following process:
Dev->Staging/Dev Test->UAT
Which works fine as we didn't have an actual release.
My question is how can Octopus support our new way of working?
Do we create a new/clone project in Octopus named RC1 and have CI from our RC1 branch into that? Then add/remove as appropriate as this RC's are no longer required?
Or is there another method that we've clearly missed out on?
It seems that most organisations that are striving for continuous something end up with a CI server and continuous deployment up to some manual sign off environment and then require continuous delivery to production. This generally leads to a branching strategy in order to isolate the release candidate to allow hot fixing.
I think a question like this raises more points for discussion, before trying to provide a one size fits all answer IMHO.
The kind of things that spring to mind are:
Do you have "source code" dependencies or binary ones for any shared components.
What level of integration / automated regression testing do you have.
Is your deployment orchestrated by TFS, or driven by a user in Octopus.
Is there a database as part of the application that needs consideration.
How is your application version numbering controlled.
What is your release cycle.
In the past where I've encountered this scenario, I would look towards a code promotion branching strategy which provides you with one branch to maintain in production - This has worked well where continuous deployment to production is not an option. You can find more branching strategies discussed on the ALM Rangers page on CodePlex
Developers / Testers can continually push code / features / bug fixes through staging / uat. At the point of release the Dev branch is merged to Release branch, which causes a release build and creates a nuget package. This should still be released to Octopus in exactly the same way, only it's a brand new release and not a promotion of a previous release. This would need to ensure that there is no clash on version numbering and so a strategy might be to have a difference in the major number - This would depend on your current setup. This does however, take an opinionated view that the deployment is orchestrated by the build server rather than Octopus Deploy. Primarily TeamCity / TFS calls out to the Ocotpus API, rather than a user choosing the build number in Octopus (we have been known to make mistakes)
ocoto.exe create-release --version GENERATED_BY_BUILD_SERVER
To me, the biggest question I ask clients is "What's the constraint that means you can't continuously deploy to production". Address that constraint (see theory of constraints) and you remove the need to work round an issue that needn't be there in the first place (not always that straight forward I know)
I would strongly advise that you don't clone projects in Octopus for different environments as it's counter intuitive. At the end of the day you're just telling Octopus to go and get this nuget package version for this app, and deploy it to this environment please. If you want to get the package from a different NuGet feed for release, then you could always make use of the custom binding on the NuGet field in Octopus and drive that by a scoped variable depending on the environment you're deploying to.
Step 1 - Setup two feeds
Step 2 - Scope some variables for those feeds
Step 3 - Consume the feed using a custom expression
I hope this helps
This is unfortunately something Octopus doesn't directly have - true support for branching (yet). It's on their roadmap for 3.1 under better branching support. They have been talking about this problem for some time now.
One idea that you mentioned would be to clone your project for each branch. You can do this under the "Settings" tab (on the right-hand side) in your project that you want to clone. This will allow you to duplicate your project and simply rename it to one of your branches - so one PreRelease or Release Candidate project and other is your mainline Dev (I would keep the same name of the project). I'm assuming you have everything in the same project group.
Alternatively you could just change your NuSpec files in your projects in different branches so that you could clearly see what's being deployed at the overview project page or on the dashboard. So for your RC branch, you could just add the suffix -release within the NuSpec in your RC branch which is legal (rules on Semantic Versioning talk about prereleases at rule #9). This way, you can use the same project but have different packages to deploy. If your targeted servers are the same, then this may be the "lighter" or simpler approach compared to cloning.
I blogged about how we do this here:
http://www.alexjamesbrown.com/blog/development/working-branch-deployments-tfs-octopus/
It's a bit of a hack, but in summary:
Create branch in TFS Create branch specific build definition
Create branch specific drop location for Octopack
Create branch specific Octopus Deployment Project (by cloning your ‘main’ deployment
Edit the newly cloned deployment, re-point the nuget feed location to your
branch specific output location, created in step 3
I'm using Visual Studio Online, and looking at CI and automated deploys
My Web Test Project has three branches: DEV,UAT,LIVE
I have a build Definition that builds from the DEV branch and uses msbuild to deploy the Website to my UAT server, this works fine. What I would like to do is after the publish, branch the code from DEV to UAT
any help would be appreciated
You can use PowerShell post test to call "tf merge" to push code from DEV to UAT.
You are doing it the wrong way round. If you are promoting by quality that is a value of the build output and not the code.
A better way would be to not have branch by quality (dev->qa) but to have branch by release (1.0->2.0). Then have a single build on a version that progress through DEV->QA. This is the recommended method of controlling quality and minimises risk. The release management tools that are part of TFS and VSO use this method.
http://nakedalm.com/create-release-management-pipeline-professional-developers/
If you want to increase and control quality you will need to move away from branch by quality. It is not possible to achieve continuous delivery of any form with it.