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Implementing Continuous Deployment

seamless application deliveries with a DevOps mindset

Vincent PartingtonCTO & Co-founder XebiaLabs

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Introduction

• Vincent Partington, CTO XebiaLabs.

• Deployit, Deployment Automation solution.

• On Java EE platforms and related platforms.

• IBM WebSphere, Oracle WebLogic, JBoss, Tomcat, and others.

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Agenda

• Application deployment challenges.

• Definition of continuous deployment.

• Prerequisites for continuous deployment.

• So how does it work?

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Application deployment challenges

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Application deployment challenges

• More frequent application releases because of:

• Increasing business demands

• Agile development methods

• More and more environments because of:

• More middleware technology added

• Cloud infrastructure

• This means more and more deployments.

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What is application deployment?

• Deployment is about making an application available to end users:

• Application delivered by development team.

• Application installed by operations team.

• Or: Stop servers, install artifacts, configure resources, start servers, etc.

• Or: Read The Fine (60 page) Manual.

• Or: Ask the developer.

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Current deployment practices

• Two manual processes:

• Hand-over from development to operations.

• Manual deployment procedures followed by developers and/or operations.

• The first is time-consuming, the second is error-prone.

• Typical IT answer: Automation!

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Current IT landscape

Change Management

Configuration Management

MonitoringHP Tivoli,…

Scripts

IDEsRAD,

Eclipse…

SCMClearCase,

SVN...

Continuous Build Bamboo, Hudson…

Interactive BuildMaven, Ant…

Release Management

Largely automatedLargely

automated

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Deployment automation features

• Standard format for delivery by development.

• Integration with developer tools.

• Integration with target middleware.

• Integration with operations tools.

• Role-based security.

• Reporting on history and current state.

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DevOps

• Movement started out of disappointment with the current state of affairs in IT: fear of change, risky deployments, “works on my machine” attitude, silo’s.

• About applying agile principles to IT operations:

• Multidisciplinary teams: dev and ops together.

• Focus on end-result, working in increments.

• Automation where possible (Forrester: “NoOps”).

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So what is

Continuous Deployment?

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Continuous integration

• Emerged at the end of the ‘90s as one of the XP practices.

• By continuously building and testing software quality should improve.

• Tests are often limited to unit tests (e.g. JUnit).

• Sometimes functional tests are included too (e.g. Selenium).

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Shortcomings of most CI setups

• Deployment to the target platform is often not part of the CI cycle.

• That means: deployment procedures are not tested.

• And that means: application is not tested on target platform.

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So what is continuous deployment?

• Strictest definition:

• Every (tagged) version goes straight into production.

• Used by LinkedIn amongst others.

• Less strict:

• Include deployment automation the CI cycle to test the deployed artifact.

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Prerequisites for

Continuous Deployment

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Standard delivery format

Deployment Package

Manifest

Artifacts (Java EE, HTML, etc.)

Configuration files

Middleware resources

Post-deployment tests

Dependencies

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Environments

Environment

Appserver

Database

HTTP Server

Message Broker

Auth. Proxy

Host

...

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Application deployments

Application Environment

Environment

EnvironmentApplication

Application

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Deployment customization

• At deployment time, not at build time!

• In artifacts and in configurations.

• Property replacement for configurations.

• Placeholder replacement for artifact contents.

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Deployment customization

EAR

Datasource

Application server

Ear to AppServer

Datasource to Appserver

- username = u_app_test_env- password = ********

- SERVICE.URL = http://app-test.mycompany.com

- jndi = jdbc/myAppDS

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Demo

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Setup

IDE CI system

Versioncontrol

Buildsystem

Cha

ng

e c

od

e

Applicationserver

Deployit

Dete

ct change B

uild

co

de

Push

pa

cka

ge &

trig

ger d

ep

loym

ent D

eplo

y a

pplic

atio

n

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Advantages• Application is automatically tested on target platform after every

modification.

• Developers can no longer ignore deployment.

• Increase of quality.

• Same deployment automation can be used to deploy to acceptance and production environments.

• Less hand-over moments.

• Increate of speed, and quality.

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More info

• Visit our website at http://www.xebialabs.com

• Follow us on Twitter: @XebiaLabs

• Follow me on Twitter: @vpartington