Skip to main content

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.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Send e-mail with attachment through OSB

Oracle Service Bus (OSB) contains a good collection of adapter to integrate with any legacy application, including ftp, email, MQ, tuxedo. However e-mail still recognize as a stable protocol to integrate with any application asynchronously. Send e-mail with attachment is a common task of any business process. Inbound e-mail adapter which, integrated with OSB support attachment but outbound adapter doesn't. This post is all about sending attachment though JavaCallout action. There are two ways to handle attachment in OSB: 1) Use JavaCallout action to pass the binary data for further manipulation. It means write down a small java library which will get the attachment and send the e-mail. 2) Use integrated outbound e-mail adapter to send attachment, here you have to add a custom variable named attachment and assign the binary data to the body of the attachment variable. First option is very common and easy to implement through javax.mail api, however a much more developer manage t
Post a Comment
Read more

Tip: SQL client for Apache Ignite cache

A new SQL client configuration described in  The Apache Ignite book . If it got you interested, check out the rest of the book for more helpful information. Apache Ignite provides SQL queries execution on the caches, SQL syntax is an ANSI-99 compliant. Therefore, you can execute SQL queries against any caches from any SQL client which supports JDBC thin client. This section is for those, who feels comfortable with SQL rather than execute a bunch of code to retrieve data from the cache. Apache Ignite out of the box shipped with JDBC driver that allows you to connect to Ignite caches and retrieve distributed data from the cache using standard SQL queries. Rest of the section of this chapter will describe how to connect SQL IDE (Integrated Development Environment) to Ignite cache and executes some SQL queries to play with the data. SQL IDE or SQL editor can simplify the development process and allow you to get productive much quicker. Most database vendors have their own front-en
Post a Comment
Read more

Load balancing and fail over with scheduler

Every programmer at least develop one Scheduler or Job in their life time of programming. Nowadays writing or developing scheduler to get you job done is very simple, but when you are thinking about high availability or load balancing your scheduler or job it getting some tricky. Even more when you have a few instance of your scheduler but only one can be run at a time also need some tricks to done. A long time ago i used some data base table lock to achieved such a functionality as leader election. Around 2010 when Zookeeper comes into play, i always preferred to use Zookeeper to bring high availability and scalability. For using Zookeeper you have to need Zookeeper cluster with minimum 3 nodes and maintain the cluster. Our new customer denied to use such a open source product in their environment and i was definitely need to find something alternative. Definitely Quartz was the next choose. Quartz makes developing scheduler easy and simple. Quartz clustering feature brings the HA and
Post a Comment
Read more