Automation at the Edge - Atlanta DevOps World Tour

1. Automation at the
Edge
CI/CD Pipelines for Content Delivery
Networks

2. Introduction
Duncan McAllister
Accelerate our customer's business through a partnership focused on
expertise, innovation, and education.
Akamai Global Consulting Services

3. Content Delivery Networks (CDNs)
Caching Network Acceleration Content Targeting Security

4. Content Delivery – more than caching…
Application Load Balancing
Multivariate Testing
Feature Toggles
Content Assembly

5. Who interfaces with the CDN?
Developers Network Engineers QA Security Sales and Marketing

6. Leverage CDN Features Faster
With enough handoffs, the
work can completely loose
the context of the problem
being solved or the
organizational goal being
supported.”
“
Velocity of CDN releases need to keep
pace with everything else
CDN integrated environments
should be easily obtainable
Fast feedback to enable small
incremental versions
Quick roll-back and issue
reproducibility is key to promote
solution stability

7. Solution – Automate CDN Management
Treat CDN configurations as artifacts
Include CDN in the automated testing
lifecycle
CDN should adhere to the same standards as
other artifacts and assets (CI)
Eliminate / Minimize manual steps required to
deploy to production (CD)

8. CDN CI/CD Considerations
Security – Certificates and Secrets management
Operational – Deployment, Traffic Management,
Cache management
Provisioning – self-service / ephemeral
environments
Testing – TTLs, Behaviors, Content

9. CI Toolkit
Client and
Signing Libraries
APIs
Custom
Behaviors
Akamai
CLI
Property
Manager API
Faster
Activations

10. Spectrum of CDN Management
Maintain via
Abstraction
Develop
Interactively
Edit raw data
Higher emphasis on
static code analysis
Reduced portability
across providers
Highest LOE /
Complexity
CDN agnostic (load
balancing)
Lowest common
denominator features
CDN
Managed
Easiest to adopt
GUI Supported
Limited / No
Portability
Mostly manual

11. CDN Management
Common Automation Use Cases
Configuration
Security
Operations

12. API vs CLI
Enables granular modification of
Property Manager Behaviors
Cloudlet policy adjustments
Higher development overhead
Useful for operational tasks
(provision, activate, retrieve)
Package management inherits
new API features
Low learning curve
API CLI

14. CDN Pipeline Case Study

15. CDN Delivery Pipeline
Provision, Deploy, Activate processes are
accomplished using the CLI
CDN features are introduced via the Property
Manager UI / PAPI
VCS becomes the source of truth for CDN
logic (metadata)
Merge event triggers deployment pipeline

16. Consolidated Pipeline Sequence

17. CDN Feature Testing
HTTP Headers are inspected to validate Edge
features
Validate object TTL assignment, response
codes
Analyze session debug headers to determine
proper behaviors are being applied
Additional response attributes to consider:
content encoding, protocol version, security
policy

18. CI Defined
Logic is implemented in a GOLD dev
Property Manager Instance
All changes are captured and tested within a
short-lived feature branch.
Ephemeral Environment used to deploy and
test the feature branch artifact.
Platform warnings/errors are captured and
used to fail validation pipeline if encountered.

19. Externalize Configuration
Environment Origin
Feature Flags
ACLs
Delivery
Configuration
Environment
Specific Variables

21. Avoid Monolithic Configurations
Difficult to manage and troubleshoot
Must reconcile features at different
development stages across multiple
match conditions
Environment specific features could
break other upstream/downstream
environments

22. Avoid Snowflakes
Undermines efforts to maintain a global
configuration state
Issues are rarely reproducible, compounding the
impact and time to resolve stability issues
Environment specific features could break other
upstream/downstream environments

23. Test CDN Early in the SDLC
”The earlier we find problems, the cheaper it is
to fix them!”
Early stage CI test suites should complete
quickly
New property validation service for static code
analysis

24. Integrate with CMS
Ensure content invalidation is timely and
surgical
Invalidation can be performed via API and
CLI
FastPurge is supported natively!

25. Monitor Traffic, Offload, and Errors
Understand the impact features have on user
behavior and business KPIs
Analyze data from RUM (mPulse) and synthetic
(WPT) sources
Consider these measurements when shaping
CDN feature backlog or roadmap

26. Register for our Developer Program1
Learn about new use capabilities2
Tweet feedback @akamaidev3
developer.akamai.com/devops
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27. ThankYou

28. Property Manager
PAPI / CLI
Akamai
Trigger Provision Test Actiate
Create Gold
Config
Create Dev/QA
Config
Push Prod
config
Done!
Pipeline Tools
Branch
Pull
Merge

29. Sample Jenkins Pipeline
Source: https://gcs.akshayranganath.com/user/akrangan/my-views/view/My%20Pipeline/