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Apr 20
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From Jenkins X – Asking and Finding Help: Outreachy

By Blog, Project

Originally posted on the Jenkinx X blog by Neha Gupta

Neha Gupta is adding support for Kustomize in Jenkins X, to enable Kubernetes native configuration management, while participating in Outreachy from December 2019 to March 2020.

Outreachy open-source contribution for applicants — Asking/Finding help

This blog might be helpful for beginners who are fear-stricken or I would say hesitant to ASK, to get lost in the new world while trying to understand any open source project, fear of asking questions that may sound stupid later on or are very obvious! First of all.. Relax!

  • Everyone starts from somewhere and has a learning curve!..
  • There are some pre-requisites that may help you get into open-source development better..
  • Learn basics of git operations. (https://learngitbranching.js.org , I find this easy and helpful).
  • Try to find an open-source project (remember : you’re going to contribute to a part of it, so it’s okay if some/many things doesn’t make sense in the beginning, because it’s easier to write code than to understand someone else’s code).
  • For selecting a project you may also look for Google-Summer-of-Code, Outreachy, Google-Code-In, RSoC and other open-source programs and their organisations that helps people/students/aspiring developers to find your best interest communities and projects.

NOTE : Beware! seeing too many organisations and projects will only confuse you, so start with only one or max 2 projects, try to deep-dive and focus on them.

After selecting the project :

  • Connect with the community through their communication channels for both developers and users (example : Slack, IRC-Cloud, Zulip, Riot etc )
  • Try to read the documentation and understand the overall structure and purpose of the project you’re starting to work on.
  • If you don’t understand something functionality wise — just ask! Ask on the communication channel.
  • If you are facing any error — Google search it, or try to look into the existing issues, if you’re not able to move forward and you’re stuck on the same error for more than 45 mins, just ask! Trust me! There’s no harm. In-fact, people of open-source communities appreciate it, feels motivated when there are users asking them about something that they’re passionately building. It also sometimes, helps the community to re-define and re-align the product and some features.

Happy learning! 🙂

Apr 20
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From Jenkins X – Outreachy: Motivation to apply!

By Blog, Project

Originally posted on the Jenkins X blog by Neha Gupta

Neha Gupta is adding support for Kustomize in Jenkins X, to enable Kubernetes native configuration management, while participating in Outreachy from December 2019 to March 2020.

Motivation to apply to Outreachy:

In my graduation class of fifty people we were three girls struggling to set up our space and comfort with the weird reactions we got from fellow students for trying to understand technology. When my professor asked us to make an autonomous drone. I couldn’t make one, I was shattered, until a friend from computer science batch helped me make one. He showed me some of the cool apps he made, that sparked an interest, and I started building apps, realising that computer science is beyond just coding, it’s more about solving real life problems.

I’ve transitioned from mobile to web apps, server-end development, robotics, cloud architecting, and also cofounding a startup. I’ve been focusing on using AI to make smarter apps, and help students think beyond, and see the bigger picture. I’m hoping to start an accelerator, regulating the perception about technology, focusing especially on hidden potential behind fear-stricken girls.

When I heard about Outreachy program and I liked how women and other minority communities are being supported and motivated. It felt something similar to what I’m trying to do with the young girls around me (breaking the stereotypical phenomenon of “girls can’t code”). I felt participating in Outreachy will not only boost my but other girls motivation too! and it’ll also definitely help me grow technologically, socially and mentally.

Why excited about Outreachy?

To me it feels really cool to work with a team remotely. The interactions, networking and feel is completely different, especially when it’s open-source (Like ..I get anxious before asking questions on public channels, if the question is too logical and stupid). Also, I’m a fan of open-source contributions, so… (here was the chance).

Another reason was to interact with the minority community (people who are facing similar issues in STEM like me) and share some instances with them, be on the same page, enlighten and get enlightened (all that networking sounds fun..). I am also excited about the trip. Why Jenkins-X?

The Cloud Storage backed Helm repository idea seemed interesting, so I started exploring it. The project was also quite different from other listed (maybe because it was meant for me 😀 ), I only contributed to it and focused on it.

Also the community was very welcoming and communications with my mentor were good. He helped me making contributions to the project, he guided me to some good first issues, helped me correct my PR’s. Jenkins-X looked as an interesting open-source project so I’m glad I tried to be a part of it and got selected.

What would I tell someone who is worried about applying to Outreachy?

If you are someone who has just started open source contributions and are fear stricken on how is it gonna work? These all things seems so confusing and you’re overwhelmed.

Don’t worry! ..

I was too! Every one is.. and this is just step — 1. Anyone who’s going to pick up a new project which is production ready and thousands/millions of people are using it, is going to be confused! This is normal and natural (the initial learning curve), but once you overcome it. Things become so normal and understanding, people are here to help you out.

If you think you can’t make it because of the competition, how does matter? If not this time, next time (I myself got selected after 3 years of trying), you anyway has to start one day, so let it be today. But the learnings you take away from the process, are insanely valuable and every-time it’s gonna become easier.. Feel free to reach me if you are facing any issues regarding starting with open-source contributions or if you have question saying — shall I apply to Outreachy this time?

Good Luck! 🙂

Apr 17
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From Jenkins – WebSocket

By Blog, Project

Originally posted on the Jenkins blog by Jesse Glick

I am happy to report that JEP-222 has landed in Jenkins weeklies, starting in 2.217. This improvement brings experimental WebSocket support to Jenkins, available when connecting inbound agents or when running the CLI. The WebSocket protocol allows bidirectional, streaming communication over an HTTP(S) port.

While many users of Jenkins could benefit, implementing this system was particularly important for CloudBees because of how CloudBees Core on modern cloud platforms (i.e., running on Kubernetes) configures networking. When an administrator wishes to connect an inbound (formerly known as “JNLP”) external agent to a Jenkins master, such as a Windows virtual machine running outside the cluster and using the agent service wrapper, until now the only option was to use a special TCP port. This port needed to be opened to external traffic using low-level network configuration. For example, users of the nginx ingress controller would need to proxy a separate external port for each Jenkins service in the cluster. The instructions to do this are complex and hard to troubleshoot.

Using WebSocket, inbound agents can now be connected much more simply when a reverse proxy is present: if the HTTP(S) port is already serving traffic, most proxies will allow WebSocket connections with no additional configuration. The WebSocket mode can be enabled in agent configuration, and support for pod-based agents in the Kubernetes plugin is coming soon. You will need an agent version 4.0 or later, which is bundled with Jenkins in the usual way (Docker images with this version are coming soon).

Another part of Jenkins that was troublesome for reverse proxy users was the CLI. Besides the SSH protocol on port 22, which again was a hassle to open from the outside, the CLI already had the ability to use HTTP(S) transport. Unfortunately the trick used to implement that confused some proxies and was not very portable. Jenkins 2.217 offers a new -webSocket CLI mode which should avoid these issues; again you will need to download a new version of jenkins-cli.jar to use this mode.

The WebSocket code has been tested against a sample of Kubernetes implementations (including OpenShift), but it is likely that some bugs and limitations remain, and scalability of agents under heavy build loads has not yet been tested. Treat this feature as beta quality for now and let us know how it works!

Apr 17
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From Jenkins – Atlassian’s new Bitbucket Server integration for Jenkins

By Blog, Project

Originally posted on the Jenkins blog by Daniel Kjellin

We know that for many of our customers Jenkins is incredibly important and its integration with Bitbucket Server is a key part of their development workflow. Unfortunately, we also know that integrating Bitbucket Server with Jenkins wasn’t always easy – it may have required multiple plugins and considerable time. That’s why earlier this year we set out to change this. We began building our own integration, and we’re proud to announce that v1.0 is out.

The new Bitbucket Server integration for Jenkins plugin, which is built and supported by Atlassian, is the easiest way to link Jenkins with Bitbucket Server. It streamlines the entire set-up process, from creating a webhook to trigger builds in Jenkins, to posting build statuses back to Bitbucket Server. It also supports smart mirroring and lets Jenkins clone from mirrors to free up valuable resources on your primary server.

Our plugin is available to install through Jenkins now. Watch this video to find out how, or read the BitBucket Server solution page to learn more about it.

Once you’ve tried it out we’d love to hear any feedback you have. To share it with us, visit https://issues.jenkins-ci.org and create an issue using the component atlassian-bitbucket-server-integration-plugin.

Apr 09
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Screwdriver: Introducing Queue Service

By Blog, Project
Introducing Queue Service

Pritam Paul, Software Engineer, Verizon Media

We have recently made changes to the underlying Screwdriver Architecture for build processing. Previously, the executor-queue was tightly-coupled to the SD API and worked by constantly polling for messages at specific intervals. Due to this design, the queue would block API requests. Furthermore, if the API crashed, scheduled jobs might not be added to the queue, causing cascading failures.

Hence, keeping the principles of isolation-of-concerns and abstraction in mind, we designed a more resilient REST-API-based queueing system: the Queue Service. This new service reads, writes and deletes messages from the queue after processing. It also encompasses the former capability of the queue-worker and acts as a scheduler.

Authentication

The SD API and Queue Service communicate bidirectionally using signed JWT tokens sent via auth headers of each request.

Build Sequence
image
Design Document

For more details, check out our design spec.

Using Queue Service

As a cluster admin, to configure using the queue as an executor, you can deploy the queue-service as a REST API using a screwdriver.yaml and update configuration in SD API to point to the new service endpoint:

# config/default.yaml
ecosystem:
    # Externally routable URL for the User Interface
    ui: https://cd.screwdriver.cd

    # Externally routable URL for the Artifact Store
    store: https://store.screwdriver.cd

    # Badge service (needs to add a status and color)
    badges: https://img.shields.io/badge/build–.svg

    # Internally routable FQDNS of the queue service
    queue: http://sdqueuesvc.screwdriver.svc.cluster.local

executor:
    plugin: queue
    queue: “

For more configuration options, see the queue-service documentation.

Compatibility List

In order to use the new workflow features, you will need these minimum versions:

  • UI – v1.0.502
  • API – v0.5.887
  • Launcher – v6.0.56
  • Queue-Service – v1.0.11
Contributors

Thanks to the following contributors for making this feature possible:

Questions and Suggestions

We’d love to hear from you. If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out here. You can also visit us on Github and Slack.

Apr 09
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Screwdriver : Recent Enhancements and Bug Fixes

By Blog, Project

Recent Enhancements and Bug Fixes

Screwdriver Team from Verizon Media

UI

Previously, users could not start builds during a freeze window unless they made changes to the freeze window setting in the screwdriver.yaml configuration. Now, you can start a build by entering a reason in the confirmation modal. This can be useful for users needing to push out an urgent patch or hotfix during a freeze window.

image
image

Store

  • Feature: Build cache now supports local disk-based cache in addition to S3 cache.

Queue Worker

  • Bugfix: Periodic build timeout check
  • Enhancement: Prevent re-enqueue of builds from same event.

Compatibility List

In order to have these improvements, you will need these minimum versions:

  • UI – v1.0.479
  • API – v0.5.835
  • Store – v3.10.3
  • Launcher – v6.0.42
  • Queue-Worker – v2.9.0

Contributors

Thanks to the following contributors for making this feature possible:

Questions and Suggestions

We’d love to hear from you. If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out here. You can also visit us on Github and Slack.

Apr 09
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Screwdriver: Improvements and Fixes

By Blog, Project

Part 2 from the Screwdriver Team at Verizon Media

UI
  • Enhancement: Upgrade to node.js v12.
  • Enhancement: Users can now link to custom test & coverage URL via metadata.
  • Enhancement: Reduce number of API calls to fetch active build logs.
  • Enhancement: Display proper title for Commands and Templates pages.
  • Bug fix: Hide “My Pipelines” from Add to collection dialogue.
  • Enhancement: Display usage stats for a template.
image
API
Store
Compatibility List

In order to have these improvements, you will need these minimum versions:

  • UI – v1.0.491
  • API – v0.5.851
  • Store – v3.10.5
Contributors

Thanks to the following contributors for making this feature possible:

Questions and Suggestions

We’d love to hear from you. If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out here. You can also visit us on Github and Slack.

Apr 09
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Screwdriver: Build cache – Disk Strategy

By Blog, Project

Screwdriver now has the ability to cache and restore files and directories from your builds to either s3 or disk-based storage. Rest all features related to the cache feature remains the same, only a new storage option is added. Please DO NOT USE this cache feature to store any SENSITIVE data or information.

The graph below is our Internal Screwdriver instance build-cache comparison between disk-based strategy vs aws s3.

Build cache – get cache – (disk strategy)

image

Build cache – get cache – (s3)

image

Build cache – set cache – (disk strategy)

image

Build cache – set cache – (s3)

image

Why disk-based strategy?

Based on the cache analysis, 1. The majority of time was spent pushing data from build to s3, 2. At times the cache push fails if the cache size is big (ex: >1gb). So, simplified the storage part by using a disk cache strategy and using filer/storage mount as a disk option. Each cluster will have its own filer/storage disk mount.

NOTE: When a cluster becomes unavailable and if the requested cache is not available in the new cluster, the cache will be rebuilt once as part of the build.

Cache Size: 

Max size limit per cache is configurable by Cluster admins.

Retention policy:

Cluster admins are responsible to enforce retention policy.

Cluster Admins:

Screwdriver cluster-admin has the ability to specify the cache storage strategy along with other options like compression, md5 check, cache max limit in MB

Reference: 

  1. https://github.com/screwdriver-cd/screwdriver/blob/master/config/default.yaml#L280
  2. https://github.com/screwdriver-cd/executor-k8s-vm/blob/master/index.js#L336
  3. Issue: https://github.com/screwdriver-cd/screwdriver/issues/1830

Compatibility List:

In order to use this feature, you will need these minimum versions:

Contributors:

Thanks to the following people for making this feature possible:

Screwdriver is an open-source build automation platform designed for Continuous Delivery. It is built (and used) by Yahoo. Don’t hesitate to reach out if you have questions or would like to contribute: http://docs.screwdriver.cd/about/support.

Apr 09
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Spinnaker: 1.18 Release Introduces Spinnaker Community Stats

By Blog, Project

Author: Spinnaker Steering Committee (Travis Tomsu, Software Engineer, Google)

The Spinnaker community has grown significantly after launching as an open source project in 2015. The project maintainers increasingly look for ways to help the community better understand how Spinnaker is used, and to help contributors prioritize future improvements.

Today, feature development is guided by industry experts, community discussions, Special Interest Groups (SIGs), and events like the recently held Spinnaker Summit. In August 2019, the community published an RFC, which proposed the tooling that will enable everyone to make data-driven decisions based on product usage across all platforms. We encourage Spinnaker users to continue providing feedback, and to review and comment on the RFC.

Following on from this RFC, the Spinnaker 1.18 release includes an initial implementation of statistics collection capabilities that are used to collect generic deployment and usage information from Spinnaker installations around the world. Before going into the details, here are some important facts to know:

  • No personally identifying information (PII) is collected or logged.
  • The implementation was reviewed and is approved by the Linux Foundation’s Telemetry Data Collection and Usage Policy.
  • All stats collection code is open source and can be found in the Spinnaker stats, Echo, and Kork repos found on GitHub.
  • Users can disable statistics collection at any time through a single Halyard command.
  • Community members that want to work with the underlying dataset and/or dashboard reports can request and receive full access.

This feature exists in the Spinnaker 1.18 release,but is disabled by default while we finalize testing of the backend and fine-tune report dashboards. The feature will be enabled by default in the Spinnaker 1.19 release (scheduled for March 2020).

All data will be stored in a Google BigQuery database, and report dashboards will be publicly available from the Community Stats page. Community members can request access to the collection data.

Data collected as part of this effort allows the entire community to better monitor the growth of Spinnaker, understand how Spinnaker is used “in the wild”, and prioritize feature development across a large community of Spinnaker contributors. Thank you for supporting Spinnaker and for your help in continuing to make Spinnaker better!

Mar 16
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From Spinnaker – April’s Spinnaker Gardening #CommunityHack is Going Virtual!

By Blog, Project
Spinnaker Gardening Days Community Hack

Originally posted on the Armory blog, by Rosalind Benoit

Guess what?! Our Hackathon is going fully online! “Spinnaker Gardening Days #CommunityHack” happens in one month, and we’re gearing up for an international open-source work-from-home extravaganza! Via Zoom, Slack, and Github, we’ll empower you to move the needle on continuous delivery projects. Teams will hack, newcomers will train, and champions will share Spinnaker secrets. Click here to register and get your free tickets for the hackathon, training track, lunchtime learnings, or all three.

 Join other Spinnaker users and companies to learn and let your skills shine at this collaborative event. We’ll address open-source feature requests, extend the ecosystem, and have lots of fun. Thanks to our generous sponsor Salesforce, all logged-in participants will score prizes, premium swag, and lunch on us! Hack through the workday, or check out our noontime lightning talks. Visit the Spinnaker Gardening repository for the schedule and details.

Salesforce logo

The Armory Tribe celebrates the support of Salesforce and, in particular, Edgar Magana, a Spinnaker champion and Cloud Operations Architect. We recently sat down to discuss the Ops SIG, modeling and standardizing Spinnaker, and his ideas for hackathon projects. Read the full article here.

A relative newcomer to the Spinnaker community, but a veteran in matters of cloud computing, networking, and OSS projects like OpenStack, Edgar recently founded the Operations SIG (Special Interest Group). Just as he recognized that “the community needed a place to discuss how to operate Spinnaker better,” he also urges us to jump-start the Spinnaker community. He’s recommended improvements to the contributor experience, and persuaded Salesforce to sponsor this first-ever Spinnaker hackathon.

Of course, we touched on his most pressing open-source Spinnaker initiatives in our chat. Next up? Gather a team! 

“We really want to come to the hackathon with goals, and to put extra motivation for folks to address them as a community,” Edgar explains their sponsorship.

From Salesforce and the Ops SIG perspective, Edgar has two features stories to focus on at the hackathon:

  • “Run any OSS source code scanning software against Spinnaker microservices, and you’ll find a number of vulnerabilities in the libraries that Spinnaker leverages. We’d like to minimize and solve those as much as possible.” 
    • I’m pumped about this one because a) in many instances, this is a low-barrier-to-entry task that newer contributors can make a huge dent in, and b) every ops freak knows that fixing OSS dependencies is probably the most important security measure we touch. 
  • “Cloud driver scalability is another key initiative in progress. The dynamic account system works, but performance can be improved drastically for those using a large system with 800-1000 Kubernetes accounts. There was a bugfix in 1.17, but it still takes lots of time for clouddriver to cache new accounts, and this means a long startup time.”
    • Edgar would like to see new accounts dynamically appended to the cache instead of triggering another cache of all accounts, and has been collaborating with Armory engineers on a solution. Another excellent project goal for Community Gardening!

Here on Armory’s Community team, we second Edgar’s suggestion to make Spinnaker more “beginner-friendly” and welcoming to new contributors. Our top goals for the first half of 2020 revolve around improving the contributor experience, from promoting issue triage in SIGs, to creating and organizing documentation around Spinnaker development environment, release cycle, and contribution guidelines so that newcomers know where to find answers and how to get started. Expect to see a contributor experience project from us at the hackathon!

In the meantime, the Plugin Framework for Spinnaker that Armory and Netflix are building is maturing fast. This work will make Spinnaker more welcoming to contributors in another way: it provides clear extension points in the codebase, along with an easy way to load extensions to a running Spinnaker instance. With the Spinnaker Gardening Days, we want encourage you to build extensions. Moreover, we know that many teams using Spinnaker in production have already built custom tooling around it; we’re encouraging those teams to leverage the plugin framework to quickly share their work with the OSS community (sounds like a stellar hackathon project!). We’re better together, and with a widely adopted project like Spinnaker, you can feel sure that paying it forward will reap big dividends for you and your organization. Check out the Plugin Creators Guide and Plugin Users Guide to learn more!

Calling Edgar and all other incredible Spinnaker developers: it’s time to add your fantastic Spinnaker Gardening ideas to the Project Ideas Wiki, create a slack channel for your project, and start prepping for the most exciting online event of 2020! Don’t forget to register here and reserve your ticket : )

spinnaker-hackathon gardening readme

Learn more in the spinnaker-hackathon/gardening README

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