This document discusses techniques for automating software deployment processes. It advocates treating infrastructure configurations as code that is version controlled. It introduces Configizer, a tool that helps manage configurations. It argues that manual deployment processes are antipatterns that lead to long cycles and broken productions. The goal is to deploy software often through incremental automated processes like database migrations in order to get faster feedback.

1. Automatize-*
Crif Tech Days 2012
Boris Bucha

2. Tech days 2011
1. Get it 2. Configure it
3. Build it 4. Run it
5. Deploy it

4. “There should be two tasks for a human being to
perform to deploy software into a development,
test, or production environment: to pick the
version and environment and to press the
“deploy” button.”
[Continuous Delivery]

5. What we aim for?
• Build application binaries – ant, make… √
• Configuration (tools ??) X
• Database (tools ??) X
• Delivery (tools ??) X

6. Why?
• NHibernate: 63K LoC
• Bailiffs: 157K LoC
• R#: 500K LoC
• BAM: 1M LoC
• Russian CB: 1.3M LoC
• .NET4: 2M LoC

7. VCS almighty
• DB scripts … all configurations … deployment
scripts … application source code
EVERYTHING!

8. Antipattern #1
• Manual Configuration Management of
Production Environments
– Hours to enable new team member
– Hours to install any new environment
– Hours to get WHY it doesn’t work on my PC ?!

9. Infrastructure as code
• “Infrastructure as code is an approach whereby infrastructure
configuration is scripted or described by files
that are stored in version control, and
changes are pushed out to the datacenter in
a controlled manner. This parallels the discipline of
source control and build promotion used in software
development, hence ‘as code’” [http://www.thoughtworks.com/articles/technology-
radar-january-2011]

10. Configizer
+
Configize !

11. Configizer v2
• Adopted by: Bailiffs, Elixir, Kolikmam, BAM
• New features:
– Hidden passwords
– Better parameters factoring possibilities
– Encryption of critical sections
– Owaspize
• Thank you: Ondrej, Ľuboš, Roman, Andrej

12. Antipattern #2
• Deploying Software Manually
– Diffing Test DB with some “prod-like” DB
– Long installation instructions
– Long delivery cycles
– Broken productions
– Evenings / Weekends in office fixing

13. Deliver often
• MVP hype [Agile-*, Lean-*] -> feedback
• Incremental DB patches (*-Migrations libs)
• Automatic package build –best documentation
• Enterprise software on any unplugged laptop
• Feature toggles (use feature branches not version branches)
“If it hurst …”

14. So again
1. Get it 2. Configure it
3. Build it 4. Run it
5. Deploy it

15. Not there yet
• Automatic setup of web applications (and services
like Mystic) – mitigated by F5 execution
• Visible dashboards
• 100% host environment control (Puppet -
http://projects.puppetlabs.com/projects/puppet)

16. • “Repeatability and reliability derive from two
principles: automate almost everything, and
keep everything you need to build, deploy,
test, and release your application in version
control.“
[Continuous Delivery]