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From Armory – Safety Is No Accident

By Blog, Member

Originally posted on the Armory blog by Chad Tripod

Continuous Delivery and Deployment is changing the way organizations deliver software. Over the years, software delivery has morphed into a time consuming process.  With countless validations and approvals to ensure the code is safe to present to users. And with good reason, releasing bad software can severely impact a business’s brand, popularity, and even revenue. In this day and age, with customer sentiment immediately feeding back into public visibility, companies are taking even stricter measures to ensure the best software delivery and user experience.

When deploying software to production, we use words like “resilience” to talk about how the code runs in the wild. For the optimists, we use words such as “Availability Zones,” and for those more pessimistic about deployments, we say, “Failure Domains.” When I was architecting and deploying applications for Apple, eBay, and others, I always built for failure. I was always more interested in how things behave when we break things, and less so on the steady state. I’d relish in unleashing tools like Simian Army to wreak havoc on what we had built to ensure code and experience weren’t impaired. 

Nowadays, there is a much better approach to ensuring safety. Continuous Delivery (CD) has enabled organizations to shift left. Empowering developers with access to deploy directly to production, but with the guardrails needed to make sure safety isn’t compromised for speed. Luckily, the world-class engineers at Netflix and Google have built a platform, Spinnaker. Spinnaker addresses deployment resiliency concerns and empowers developers with toolsets to validate and verify as a built-in part of delivering code.

Now, let’s break down the modern model and review the tools available in the CI/CD workflow. 

Spinnaker â€“ Spinnaker is a high scale multicloud continuous delivery (CD) tool.  While leveraging the years of software delivery best practices that Netflix and Google built into Spinnaker, users get to serialize and automate all the decisions that they have baked into their current software delivery process. Approvals, environments, testing, failures, feature flagging, ticketing, etc., are all completely automated and shared across the whole organization. The end result? Built-in safety that allows DevOps teams to deploy software with great velocity.

Continuous Verification â€“ Leveraging real-time KPIs and log messages to dictate the health of code and environment. Spinnaker’s canary deployments ingest real-time metrics from data platforms including Datadog, NewRelic, Prometheus, Splunk, and Istio into a service called Kayenta. Kayenta runs these time series metrics into the Mann Whitney algorithm developed by Netflix and Google, and compares  release metrics to current production metrics. Spinnaker will then adjust or roll back deployments automatically based on success criteria. This allows math and data, rather than manual best-guesses, to dictate in real time if the user is getting the best experience from the service.

Chaos Engineering â€“ Why wait for things to break in production to fix them? There are better ways. Chaos Engineering is the practice of breaking things in pre prod environments to understand how the code behaves when it’s exercised. What happens when a dependent service goes offline? How do the other services in the application behave? How does Kubernetes deal with it? What about shutting off a process in a service? These are the measures Gremlin and Chaos Monkey give your developers. Now testing is much more than what your CI Server does, it takes into consideration the environments in which they are deployed. 

Service Mesh â€“ Service Meshes are a Kubernetes traffic management solution. Kubernetes applications can traverse many clusters, regions, and even clouds. Service Meshes are a way to manage traffic flows, traceability, and most importantly with ephemeral workloads, observability. There are many flavors of service meshes to choose from. Istio/Envoy has the most visibility, but you can also implement service meshes from nginx, consulsolo.io or even get enterprise support from companies like F5/NGINX+ or Citrix, which offer elevated ingress features. Service Meshes in the context of software delivery provide a very granular canary release. Instead of blindly sending traffic to a canary version for testing, you can instead programmatically use layer 7 traffic characteristics such as URI, host, query, path, and cookie to steer traffic. This allows you to switch only certain users, business partners, or regions to new versions of software.

DevSecOps â€“ In my years seeing changes in technology and how we deliver software to end users, one thing is for sure: security wants to understand the risks in what you’re doing. And with good reason. Security exploits can leak sensitive information or, even expose an organization to malicious hackers. Luckily this new deployment world allows security to process their scans and validations in an automated fashion. Solutions range from TwistlockArtifactory XrayAquaSignal Science, etc. There are many DevSecOps solutions, so it is a good thing to know that Spinnaker supports them all!

Spinnaker stages automate developer tools:

End Result â€“ As you put together your new cloud native tool chain, there are many ways you can improve the way you release software. I urge you to deploy the tools you need for the service you are providing, not only based on what a vendor is saying. Over time, implementing guardrails will increase your innovation and time to market. For many this will be a competitive advantage against those who move slowly, and investing in these areas will, over time, improve the hygiene of your software code, which will provide stability in your future releases. By de-risking the release processes and improving safety, the end users are given the best possible experience with your software.

Broader Scope for Meetups, More Opportunities for You to Get Involved!

By Blog, Staff

By Jacqueline Salinas, Director of Ecosystem

The CD Foundation (CDF) and premier member Cloudbees are announcing the transition of Jenkins Area Meetups (JAMs) to CI/CD Meetups. This is an important change. Under the CDF umbrella, the CI/CD community will be able to cover a broader range of topics and technologies that will include Spinnaker, Tekton, or general CI/CD. Our goal for this transition is to grow and foster collaboration within the CI/CD community.

How Do I Get Involved?

Want to join an existing meetup? There are over 106 groups in 39 countries with a total of over 34,000 members, find one near you: https://www.meetup.com/pro/cicd-cdf

Want to start a meetup? Drop me a line, I’d love to hear your idea: jsalinas@contractor.linuxfoundation.org

Thank you!

I just want to express my gratitude to the open source community. The Continuous Delivery Foundation (CDF) would not be here about to host our first North America CD Summit on November 18th at Kubecon 2019 San Diego without your contributions. 

Since the launch of the CD Foundation in March of 2019 our charter has been to serve as the vendor-neutral home for the most important open source projects for continuous delivery and specifications to expedite the release pipeline process. The first projects to be hosted by the CDF include Jenkins, Jenkins X, Spinnaker, and Tekton. Our goal at the CDF is to help facilitate an open governance model that encourages participation and technical contribution from the community. The CDF will provide a framework for long-term stewardship and sustainability for CI/CD tools part of the foundation. 

Our first step towards this was to ask the existing JAMs organizers to work with us to transition the Jenkins Meetup Pro account to CDF. This means each meetup organizer has more tools and options within meetup.com for organizing meetups and connecting with their local community. You can create customized mailing lists, integrate with Mailchimp, and track the growth of members and RSVPs over time. The overall Meetup Pro account has been rebranded to CDF. JAM organizers are welcomed to transition their meetup to CI/CD to include all four projects, but by no means are they under any obligation to do so. 

We cannot wait to see our community grow and what 2020 has to offer!

Thanks!

Jacqueline Salinas, Director of Ecosystem

Salesforce Joins New Continuous Delivery Foundation As Premier Member

By Announcement

Global CRM Leader Joins Community Committed to Growing Ecosystem of CD/CI Tools and Methodologies

San Francisco, Calif., July 1, 2019 – The Continuous Delivery Foundation (CDF), the vendor-neutral home for many of the fastest-growing projects for continuous delivery, today announced that Salesforce has joined the CDF as a premier member.

Salesforce joins other CDF premier members such as Cloudbees, IBM, Google, CapitalOne, CircleCI, jFrog, Huawei, and Netflix working together to make continuous delivery tools and processes as accessible and reliable as possible and grow the overall ecosystem.

Salesforce is increasingly adopting continuous delivery practices and tools to empower development teams to achieve a faster, more frequent release cycle. As a CDF member, Salesforce will help shape industry specifications around pipelines, workflows and other CI/CD areas, as well as provide foundational support for CI/CD tools.

“An ethos of community innovation is driving the next generation of enterprise software,” said Mark Interrante, SVP of Engineering, Salesforce. “Salesforce is proud to join the Continuous Delivery Foundation and empower developers everywhere to deliver apps at enterprise levels of trust, scale and performance.”

“With over 20 years of experience building software at scale, Salesforce has a lot of expertise to share with the community,” said Chris Kelly, Director of Open Source, Salesforce. “By collaborating with the CDF, we’re excited to help define the future of open source CI/CD tools, share our lessons learned as well as build on the industry’s experience.”

Open source technologies such as Jenkins, JenkinsX, Spinnaker and Tekton, which are hosted by the CDF, help development teams from companies of all sizes and industries improve their speed and productivity when creating cloud-native, legacy infrastructure, mobile, IoT, and bare metal applications.

“Salesforce is an established, global CRM leader, and we’re thrilled they’re working with us to help enterprises adopt CD delivery as quickly and easily as possible,” said Dan Lopez, CDF program manager. “With containers, microservices and Kubernetes on the rise, Salesforce and other CDF members have a key role to play in growing and sustaining the CI/CD ecosystem. With CDF members focused on this, software development teams are free to focus on delivering quick, stable code changes as easily as possible.”

Salesforce and other CDF members have hosting Continuous Delivery Summits this year, including events co-located with KubeCon + CloudNativeCon + Open Source Summit China and KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America respectively. Details for the Continuous Delivery Summit in San Diego will be coming soon.

Salesforce is also a member of the Linux Foundation, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, Hyperledger, the Internet Security Research Group/Let’s Encrypt, and the OpenAPI initiative.

Additional Resources

About the Continuous Delivery Foundation

Continuous delivery (CD) is a software engineering approach in which teams produce software in short cycles, ensuring that the software can be reliably released at any time. The Continuous Delivery Foundation (CDF) serves as the vendor-neutral home of many of the fastest-growing projects for continuous delivery, including Jenkins, Jenkins X, Tekton, and Spinnaker, as well as fosters collaboration between the industry’s top developers, end users and vendors to further continuous delivery best practices. The CDF is part of the Linux Foundation, a nonprofit organization. For more information about the CDF, please visit https://cd.foundation.

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