Using Rancher for highly
available deployment services
with GoCD and TeamCity
Matthew Skelton, Skelton Thatcher Consulting
@matthewpskelton / skeltonthatcher.com
Amsterdam Continuous Delivery meetup group
08 February 2017, Amsterdam, NL

Rancher + GoCD + TeamCity == 😍

Today
'Deployment Services'
Deployment orchestration with GoCD
Introduction to Rancher
Rancher: platform for deployment services
Live Demo!

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Build & Release Engineering
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Organisational 'Medicine'
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About me
Matthew Skelton
@matthewpskelton
Co-founder at
Skelton Thatcher Consulting
skeltonthatcher.com

Using Rancher for highly
available deployment
services with GoCD and
TeamCity

Safer, more rapid changes
to software systems
(Business Agility)

Deployment services as
first-class, core capabilities
for modern software teams

use logging as a
channel/vector to
make distributed systems
more testable
Invest in
Build & Release Engineering

'Deployment Services'

Minimum capabilities
•Version Control
•Build & Unit Test
•Packaging / artefact management
•Deployment & test orchestration
•Logging / metrics / dashboard

Minimum capabilities
•Version Control
•Build & Unit Test
•Packaging / artefact mgt
•Deployment & test orchestration
•Logging / metrics / dashboard

2017: build & deployment
tooling is core/critical
infrastructure – it's the only
mechanism we use to make
changes to
Production systems

DZone 2017 Guide to
DevOps &
Continuous Delivery
https://dzone.com/guides/devops-
continuous-delivery-and-automation

Article: CD Anti-Patterns
1. "One-stop shop" tools
2. Hidden logging / errors
3. Environment-driven
4. Blurred terminology
Authors: Manuel Pais & Matthew Skelton

TSK, TSK.
BAD TOOLS!!!

One-stop-shop tools 

Compose tooling w/ APIs 

Logging exposed 

Logging exposed 

Environment-driven 

Activity-driven 

'Partially successful' 

Deployment Orchestration
with GoCD

My experience
•Using GoCD since 2011
•(Used CruiseControl 2006-2011)
•100s of pipelines
•~200 build agents
•😍

However…
•GoCD is powerful
•With great power comes
responsibility some trickiness
•Forces you to really understand
your build & deployments
👍

Server + Agent model
Server
Build Agents Test Agents
Deployment Agents
Staging
Production

Value stream map
http://jeremie-martinez.com/2016/04/19/gocd-android/

Model the current activities
'Walking Skeleton' deployment pipeline
Helps to transform ways of working

Model the current activities

Model activities, not envs

Secure deployments
Use sensible
security
boundaries

GoCD encourages good
practices and approaches
for Continuous Delivery

Introduction to Rancher

"A Complete Platform for Running Containers"

Managing container
clusters is tricky
Rancher simplifies the
container 'fabric' lifecycle

Rancher Catalog

Custom Catalog !!! 

Rancher as a platform for
highly-available
deployment services

Goal: highly-available tools
•Survive host failures
•Auto-failover to healthy hosts
•Auto-scale-out under load
•Multi-zone availability

Bad old deployment services
•Single VM
•Manual installation
•Occasional backups (not tested)
•Sitting under a desk (aka random
AWS subscription)

Modern deployment services
•Either SaaS
or
•Containerised
•Built and managed as code
•Recreateable in minutes

Platform for HA deployment services
Rancher + Terraform + AWS

Blog post series
'Container Clustering with Rancher'
https://skeltonthatcher.com/blog/

HA at the Rancher level

HA at the EFS level

HA at the GoCD level (1x AZ)

HA at the GoCD level (2x AZ)

Rancher enables highly-
available build &
deployment services using
best-of-breed tools like
GoCD

Live Demo!

Demo
•Create HA Rancher platform with
Terraform
'cdams36'

Demo
•Spin up new GoCD agents via Rancher
'scale' setting

Demo
•Flexibility and power of GoCD 'value
stream map' view

Further material

Links
• GoCD: https://www.gocd.io/
• Rancher: http://rancher.com/
• Continuous Delivery with Windows & .NET by Matthew Skelton & Chris O'Dell
(O'Reilly, 2016): http://cdwithwindows.net/ (free download)
• Blog post series on High-Availability Rancher:
https://skeltonthatcher.com/blog/container-clustering-rancher-server-part-3-
aws-efs-mounts-using-rancher-nfs/
• DZone 2017 guide to Continuous Delivery:
https://dzone.com/guides/devops-continuous-delivery-and-automation

Containerised
Built and managed as code
Recreateable in minutes
Using Rancher for highly
available deployment services
with GoCD and TeamCity

thank you
Matthew Skelton & Rich Bosomworth
@matthewpskelton & @richbos
skeltonthatcher.com