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Continuous Integration (CI), A review

A few years ago (2011) in Java One Conference in Moscow, i participated with presentation about CI. During this time a lot of changes has been made with this fields. By the years many tools, plugins and frameworks has been released to help devOps to solve problems with CI. Now CI is one of the vital part of the development life cycle. With the aggressive use of cloud infrastructure and horizontal scaling of every application, now most of all application deployed in a lot of server (virtuals and dedicated). Moreover, most of the systems are heterogeneous and always need extra care (scripts) to successfully deploy the entire system. Most of the time development environment is very different from the production environment. Here is the common workflow from the development stage to production
DEV environment -> Test Environment -> UAT environment -> Production environment.
Every environments has their own characteristics, configurations. For example, most of the developers use jetty or embedded Tomcat application servers to fast development but in production environment often meet IBM or WebLogic application servers. Deployment process in jetty or IBM is very different, also In production environment frequently uses DR (disaster recovery). Workflow of the deployment process in Production environment are as follows:
1) Stop part of the application servers
2) Replicate session from the stopped servers
3) Update database with incremental scripts
4) Update new artifacts in application servers
5) Update configuration files
6) Start application servers

Their are a lot of tools in open sources to achieve the above workflow such as:
1) Puppet
2) Chef
3) Ansible e.t.c

Ansible is one of easiest and simplest tools to install, deploy and prepare environments. We have following DevOps tools in our portfolio:
1) Jenkins
2) Flyway DB
3) Ansible

A few words about flyway DB, its database migration tools to do incremental update of database objects. Supports ANSI native SQL scripts for any DB. For me it's very suitable to debug or review any sql scripts.
Ansible is a simple IT automation platform to deploy through SSH. Very easy to install and configure, working through ssh with no agent install in remote system. Ansible has very big community and a lot of plugin already developed for using in automation. With this three tools we have the following approach:

Jenkins for build project
Flyway to data base migration
Ansible for deploy application in several environments and build installation package in production environments. Most of the time in meetup or conference, i got the question how we manages and rendering different configuration files for different systems such as DEV, UAT. We uses very simple approach to solve the problem through templating. For every configuration we have some kind of template as follows:
# MQ Configuration
mq.port=@mq.port@
mq.host=@mq.host@
mq.channel=@mq.channel@
mq.queue.manager=@mq.queue.manager@
mq.ccsid=@mq.ccsid@
mq.user=@mq.user@
mq.password=@mq.password@
mq.pool.size=@mq.pool.size@
and for every environments we have defined values in xml file. For example for DEV environment we have dev.xml, for UAT environment we have uat.xml. Every xml files contains all the values such as 
<property name="mq.gf.to.queue" value="MNP2GF"/>
<property name="mq.gf.from.queue" value="GF2MNP"/>
<property name="mq.port" value="1234"/>
<property name="mq.host" value="192.168.157.227"/>
<property name="mq.channel" value="SYSTEM.DEF.SVRCONN"/>
<property name="mq.queue.manager" value="venus.queue.manager"/>
<property name="mq.ccsid" value="866"/>
<property name="mq.user" value="mqm"/>
<property name="mq.password" value="mqm01"/>
<property name="mq.pool.size" value="10"/>
<property name="mq.pool.size" value="10"/>

Every time after successful build, jenkins runs one simple python script which generates all the configuration files based on template. Such way we can deploy application in different environments and building distributive package.
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