Greg Maxey - Electric Cloud - Process as Code: An Introduction to the ElectricFlow Automation DSL

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Process as Code: An Introduction to the ElectricFlow Automation DSL

Outline
• Introduction
• What is a DSL?
• Why am I excited about EF DSL?
• Some use case where EF DSL shines
• Benefits of code-based software delivery
• Introduction to EF DSL
• EF DSL examples
• EF DSL editor
• Conclusion
• Q&A

Who am I?
Greg Maxey
Solutions Engineer at Electric Cloud, five years
Software Delivery Automation
@gpmaxey
A career in automation
• Test and measurement
• Signal processing and analysis
• System level design
• Integrated chip hardware design
• Microprocessor and system on chip design
• Network equipment testing

Show of hands
• How many of you are involved in software delivery?
• Are your primary tools UIs? or
• Are your primary tools code based / scripts?
• Do you automate the automation?
• How many of you are familiar with Electric Cloud?
• How many of you are users or ElectricFlow?

My job – DevOps Integration and Orchestration
Infrastructure
Development Operations
Developers
 Coding
 Local Builds
 Local Testing
Preflight
Build
SCM
CI
Build
Artifact
Management
QA/UAT
•Provision Environment
•Deploy
•Testing
Staging
•Deploy
•Smoke test
Production
Retrieve
Changes
Checkout
Checkout
Publish
Retrieve
On success
promote &
notify QA & UAT
On success
notify release
team
1
2
3
4
5
6
7 8 9
 Debug
 Prod
Start Release
Pipeline

Getting to software delivery automation
Governance
Orchestration
Dev Ops
Infrastructure
Business process
requirements and
constraints
(SW Delivery
Specifications)
Applications / SW

DEV
OPS
What Electric Cloud provides for Software Delivery
DEPLOY
ANY APP.
ANY VERSION.
ANYWHERE.
ANYTIME.
RELEASE
TRADITIONAL
AND CD
PIPELINES
AND RELEASES
BUILD/TEST
FLEXIBLE AND
SCALABLE
AUTOMATION FOR
DEV AND QA
OTHER
ORCHESTRATE ANY TOOLCHAIN OR PROCESS.
DSL, CLI, REST, SOAP, HTTP, API, SDK
Plugs right in to
your existing tools
ElectricFlow
DEVOPS AUTOMATION PLATFORM
SHARED CONTROL | SHARED VISIBILITY | SHARED RESOURCES
SCALABLEEXTENSIBLE SECURE
TRANSPARENTFLEXIBLE HYBRID CLOUD

Modern user experience

Application Model

What is a DSL?
A domain-specific language (DSL) is a computer
language specialized to a particular application domain. This is in
contrast to a general-purpose language (GPL), which is broadly
applicable across domains, and lacks specialized features for a
particular domain… DSLs can be further subdivided by the kind of
language, and include domain-specific markup languages, domain-
specific modeling languages (more generally, specification
languages), and domain-specific programming languages.
- Wikipedia

Examples of DSLs
• HTML for webpage definition
• MATLAB for mathematical modeling
• Verilog, SystemC, LISA for HW, SoC
and uProcessor design
• Regex for text pattern matching
• make for build automation
• Chef recipes & Puppet manifests for
Infrastructure as Code
• But what for software delivery
automation?

Anders Wallgren, CTO Electric Cloud
Why am I excited about DSL?
Electric Flow DSL
• Easy to learn
• Compact
• Declarative
• Idempotent
• Inheritance
 Very fast model creation

How I used to code in ElectricFlow

Configuration Management build Manual Run Book
1. PuTTY into VOB server
2. Create dynamic view
3. … (other VOB interactions)
4. Create local copy on build machine
5. Adjust permisions
6. Modify registry
7. Run build script
8. … (other file manipulations)
9. Start Linux VM
10. Copy build to VM
11. Create RPMs on VM
12. Create check sum file
13. Copy RPMs to build machine
14. … (other file manipulations)
15. Burn CD

Spin up a field-deployable datacenter
1. Do inventory of installation media
2. Power up
3. Verify networking is operational
4. Install the base services and infrastructure software
5. Install the main software components
6. Perform functional test subworkflow activity
7. Checkout XYZ functionality
8. Test and checkout
9. Verify component interoperability

Top level installation workflow

When models get large
Servers Services
TypeA svs1, svs2, svs3
TypeB svs1, svs4, svs5, svs6, svs7
TypeC svs8, svs9
TypeD svs8, svs10, svs11
TypeE svs12
… ..

Onboard applications
Development Continuous Integration Continuous Deployment
Visual
Studio
.NET
Eclipse
Java
xCode
SCM
Code Analysis
Build
Unit Test
ArtifactManagement
Release Pipeline
Deploy Target Containers
IIS Apprenda iOS
QA UAT PROD

Onboarding Parameters
[
{
"name": "appName",
"label": "Application Name",
"description": "The name of the application to be onboarded",
"defaultValue": "My Application"
},
{
"name": "sourceLocation",
"label": "Source Code Location",
"description": "SCM location for CI",
"defaultValue": "http://gitlab.mycompany.com/apps/myapp.git"
},
{
"name": "stages",
"label": "Stage names",
"description": "Comma-separated list of stages for pipeline",
"defaultValue": "Dev,QA,UAT,Staging,Prod"
},
…

Automating the automation

These use cases showed me the power of DSL
• Easier iterative model development
• Data-driven model creation
• Enable end-to-end process generation

Benefits of EF DSL to enterprise software delivery
• Documented process
• Executable specification
• Ease onboarding of new and legacy projects and teams
• Ability to use mature code-based tools and approaches
• Create and manage very complex delivery processes
• Enable working at scale with teams of thousands
• Matching the right interface to the particular user

Benefits of Code-based approaches in general
• Leverage mature tool chains and best practices
• IDEs
• SCM / versioning
• Modular design
• Test-driven development
• Static analysis and other code quality tools
• Ease of Refactoring
• Sharing / Collaboration
• Scales well
• Easier data-driven approaches

ElectricFlow Domain Specific Language, EF DSL
• Groovy-based
• Native access to ElectricFlow
platform
• Supports entire EF API
• Enables model authoring and
scripting
And as said before
• Easy to learn
• Compact
• Declarative
• Idempotent
• Inheritance

ElectricFlow platform addresses Process Automation
End-to-end software delivery automation through
graphical/Web interface
• Centralized
• Secure
• High scalability
• Visibility
• Traceable
• Fault tolerant

EF DSL Examples - DEMO
• Configuration Management Procedure
• Onboarding legacy applications
 Procedures
 Environment models
 Application models
 Pipeline delivery discipline
• Spinning up new projects
 Training set up

DEMO

Samples on Github

EF DSL IDE, Lite Editor - DEMO

DSL IDE available on Github

Conclusion
When it comes to software delivery,
ElectricFlow UI is great for
 Visualization
 Medium Scale content authoring
For large-scale automating the automation EF DSL
 Gives full access to ElectricFlow platform
 Enables code-based authoring, or Process-as-Code

Thank you
Networking
Other Systems
ISV, Internet
& Entertainment
Heavy Industry
Financial
Services
Automotive Medical Devices
Semiconductor
Aerospace /
Defense
Mobile Devices
Q&A

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