CONTINUOUS DELIVERY

Getting software released to users can be risky, time-consuming and painful. The solution is the ability to deliver reliable software continuously through build, test and deployment automation, and through improved collaboration between developers, testers and operations. In this tutorial we will present principles and technical practices that enable teams to incrementally deliver software of high quality and value into production whenever they want, and extremely fast. The size of the project or the complexity of its code base does not matter.

In the first half of the tutorial we will introduce the concepts of continuous delivery, through continuous integration; and automation of the build, test and deployment process. We will also go through som basic principles and patterns for building automatable applications (architecture). We will cover experiences on team collaboration patterns and lastly; techniques for solving tasks such as an easy and comprehendible version control strategy.

The second half of the tutorial we will be working with automated provisioning of agile infrastructure, including the use of tools (puppet) to automate the management of testing and production environments. We will go through some scripting lessons examplifying how to implement zero-downtime deploys (… and rollback – if something goes wrong!), with examples in both bash and Ruby. Along with controlling the start, stop, restart lifecycles during deploys, we will also show some simple techniques for backups, logging, error handling, monitoring and verification of application health that can make the automation more robust.

We will also use servers "in the cloud" to demonstrate different techniques, and we hope to make it a fun day and to deliver software (examples) several times throughout the workshop.

Required knowledge: Agile/Lean basics, Linux basics, version control basics, maven basics.