James Cammarata shares his journey and insights on continuous delivery, emphasizing the importance of automation in software releases using Ansible. He highlights the benefits of simplicity, reusability, and extensibility that Ansible offers, alongside practical examples from companies like Atlassian and RisingStack. The document also discusses the significance of automated testing, monitoring, and ChatOps for enhancing team communication and operational efficiency.

1. ACHIEVING CONTINUOUS
DELIVERY:
AN AUTOMATION STORY

2. ABOUT ME
JAMES CAMMARATA, DIRECTOR - CORE ENGINEERING
Python developer since 2003
Started contributingto Cobbler in September of 2008, and took
over the projectleadership in 2010
Joined Ansible in July, 2013

3. WHAT IS CONTINUOUS
DELIVERY?

4. Continuous deliveryaims to reduce the impactof releasing
software bydoingitmore frequently.
Popularized in the book 'Continuous Delivery: Reliable Software
Releases through Build, Test, and DeploymentAutomation',
written byJez Humble and David Farleyin 2010.

5. (VIDEO)

6. WHY USE ANSIBLE FOR
CONTINUOUS DELIVERY?

7. SIMPLICITY
No agents, and aclean playbook syntax are undoubtably
Ansible's two greateststrengths.

8. AUTOMATION OF COMPLEX DEPLOYMENT
ORCHESTRATION
Rollingreboots of web servers
Migratingprimary/secondary/tertiarydatabases like MySQL
Buildingand deployingnew AMIs/virtualinstances or
containers for immutable infrastructure
Removing/re-enablingmonitoringon servers or services being
updated

9. REUSABILITY AND CONSISTENCY
Developers usingVagrantor other setups locallycan easily
check outthe exactsame playbooks run in stagingand/or
production to ensure consistency.
Your CI system can use the exactsame playbooks too, rather
than shellscriptingeverything.

10. EXTENSIBILITY
Ansible has over 250 modules included, butif you need to
interface with an API we don'tsupport, writingmodules to
extend the functionalityis veryeasyand straightforward.

11. OTHERS HAVE ALREADY DONE THIS
Tons of blogs outthere alreadyoutline how to setallof this up
usingAnsible, so mostof the hard work has been done for you!
Ansible's user communityhas exploded, and gettinghelp is easy.

12. COMMON PATTERNS

13. CONTINUOUS INTEGRATION SYSTEM
Jenkins/Hudson, TravisCI, etc.
(source,DevOpsReactions–http://bit.ly/1NkG1ax)

14. SOURCE CONTROL
Stores both the application code and your Ansible playbooks
(infrastructure as data, notcode).
Allcommits trigger an automatic deploymentto the staging/QA
environment(s), followed byautomated testing.
If the automated testingpasses, the deploymentto production
can triggered byaperson or automatically.

15. AUTOMATED TESTING
Absolutelycriticalto continuous integration and delivery,
automated testingis whatverifies your code is ok to deploy.
Unittesting
Integration testing
Selenium, Ghost/CasperJS, etc.

16. MONITORING (ALL THE THINGS!)
Logand graph everything(Graphite and other popular projects
make this nearlytrivial). This is how you diagnose problems with
anygiven deploymentlater.
(source,https://codeascraft.com/2010/12/08/track-every-release/)
An excellentDigitalOcean blogon Graphite+statsd+collectd:
http://bit.ly/1Gx4UM2

17. CHATOPS

18. BENEFITS OF CHATOPS:
Everyone knows whateveryone else is doing, leadingto an
increased levelof transparencyacross your teams.
Because of this transparency, these actions also become self-
documentingwhich helps new hires learn the ropes more
quickly, especiallyif they're remote.
Communication is instantaneous and more fluid, as Ops don't
have to flip between emailor head off to a'war room'for
issues.
Time to execute actions is reduced, as there is now asingle
interface to trigger actions on disparate pieces of
infrastructure.

19. CASE STUDIES

20. ATLASSIAN

21. Atlassian is averywellknown software company, with products
such as JIRA, HipChatand Confluence to name afew.
Uses Ansible to address whattheycallthe 'lastmile problem', or
the finalstep in continuous deployment.
From their blog:
Developers perform continous testing/integration against
feature branches
After these feature branches are merged into the release
branch, Bamboo (Atlassian's CI product) is used to create a
build artifact(binary)
Ansible is used to deploythis same artifactto each of the
staging, QAand production environments in turn

22. ATLASSIAN (CONT.)
Advantages:
1. Promotingthe same build artifactthrough each environment
ensures consistency.
2. Despite usingin-house products, their approach is very
technologyagnostic and could easilybe adapted to other tools.
Disadvantages: Internalteams are verysegregated, with strict
separation of duties (silos) for deployments.

23. RISINGSTACK

24. RisingStack is aJavaScriptconsultancygroup, focusingon
NodeJS delivery.
UsingCodeShip (a3rd partyservice) and acustom web hook
service to trigger Docker builds and Ansible deployments to
automate their container-based approach to immutable
infrastructure.
(source:http://blog.risingstack.com/shipping-node-js-applications-with-docker-and-codeship/)

25. RISINGSTACK (CONT.)
From their blog:
Commits to the master branch trigger trigger builds in the
CodeShip service
If alltests pass, anew docker image is created and uploaded to
Docker Hub
After the upload is complete, another web hook is triggered on
their (custom, in-house) service which executes Ansible
Ansible downloads and deploys the new docker image on each
application server

26. RISINGSTACK (CONT.)
Advantages: Completelyautomated with no intervention
required to deploy.
Disadvantages: Custom service, when an off-the-shelf CI system
could be used to simplifythings.

27. BIGPANDA

28. BigPandais acompanycentered around automatingincident
management, and use ChatOps and Ansible heavilyin their day
to dayoperations
5 Reasons We Love UsingAnsible for Continuous Delivery-
http://bit.ly/1EkbqEi
Their motto is: 'Make the scariestpartof the build the easiest'.

29. BIGPANDA (CONT.)
Use acombination of HipChatand Hubot(called BeanBot
internally) to automate ops tasks (aone-person ops team).

30. GRASSWIRE

31. GrassWire is arecentstartup builtaround crowd-sourcingfact
verification in news reports.
Another ChatOps follower, GrassWire deploys their software via
Slack, which nativelysupports executingwebhooks remotelyand
does notrequire achatbot.
Use Packer to build new AMIs viaJenkins, and use Ansible to
deploythose new images to production alongwith their
application.
UsingTerraform to build initialAWS environments, rather than
CloudFormation or other tools.

32. GRASSWIRE (CONT.)
Their Packer integration also uses Tower, to take advantage of
the provisioningcallback feature.
"provisioners":[{
"type":"file",
"source":"./{{user`gw_env`}}/setup_callback.sh",
"destination":"/home/ec2-user/setup_callback.sh"
},
{"type":"shell","inline":[
"sudochmod+x/home/ec2-user/setup_callback.sh",
"echosh/home/ec2-user/setup_callback.sh|sudotee--append/etc/rc.local
]}
}]
Since theyalso use Tower for other tasks, theyare able to use the
tower-clicommand directlyin Jenkins to simplifytheir Jenkins
tasks.

33. TIPS AND TRICKS

34. USE ANSIBLE TO BUILD YOUR CONTINUOUS DELIVERY
ENVIRONMENT
Roles exist(on Galaxyand generallyon Github) to build allof
these components for you now. Use them to getup and running
quickly.

35. USE ANSIBLE FROM DAY 1
If you do anything, do itfrom Ansible. Don'tSSHto aserver, just
putwhatever itis you need to do in aplaybook and run that
instead.

36. QUESTIONS?

37. ATTRIBUTIONS:
LEGO GreatBallContraption (GBC) Layout2012.9
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sUtS52lqL5w
DevOps Reactions: Continuous Delivery
http://bit.ly/1NkG1ax
Code as CraftBlog: TrackingEveryRelease
https://codeascraft.com/2010/12/08/track-every-release/
DigitalOcean Blog: An Introduction to TrackingStatistics with
Graphite, StatsD, and CollectD
http://bit.ly/1Gx4UM2
Atlassian Blog: PracticalContinuous Deployment:
http://www.slideshare.net/tarkasteve/london-atlassian-user-
group-february-2014

38. ATTRIBUTIONS (CONT.):
RisingStack: ShippingNode.js Applications with Docker and
Codeship
http://blog.risingstack.com/shipping-node-js-applications-with-
docker-and-codeship/
BigPanda:
#ChatOpsFTW: http://www.slideshare.net/chuparkoff/chatops-
ftw
5 Reasons We Love UsingAnsible for Continuous Delivery:
http://bit.ly/1EkbqEi

39. THANKS!
twitter: jimi1283 github: jimi-c