The document outlines the implementation and automation of p4 operations using UC4 software, detailing the initial setup, experiences, and the architecture involved. It highlights the advantages of streamlining maintenance, monitoring, and deployment processes, resulting in significant administrative savings and improved reliability. Overall, UC4 enhances the operational efficiency of p4 in development and deployment contexts.

1. 1
P4@UC4: Version and Automate
Everything
Bernhard Burger
Manager QA
UC4 Software
bernhard.burger@uc4.com
www.uc4.com
Logo area

2. 2
Outline
• P4@UC4: Start and First Setup
• Experiences and Learnings
• Second Setup: Automate Everything

3. 3
P4@UC4: The start
• Decided to go with P4 around 4 years ago
• Started in three different locations, two local
Servers and a proxy
• Windows based installation

4. 4
Setup
• Two
Masters:
1
in
US,
1
in
Europe
(latency
issues)
• The
setup
was
good
enough
to
meet
the
needs
of
Development
at
the
Dme
of
creaDon

5. 5
Setting up housekeeping
• HA/DR
• Index rebuilds
• Verification
àdone using windows services, scripts and tooling
according to our P4 consultant (who is GREAT!)

6. 6
Typical Problems
• Sometimes these services just stop
• Error handling, monitoring, auditing is limited
• Upgrades have to be done by hand on every
instance

7. 7
Solution
Eat (y)our own dogfood

8. 8
UC4 ONE Automation

9. 9
Basic Architecture
• Central Engine and
repository
• Agents on target
systems
• UIs
Active/Active

10. 10
The looks of it

11. 11
Combining the SW Stacks
• Setup a UC4 System for Use with P4, Agents on
all P4 machines
• Define Installation and roll it out
AUTOMATICALLY
• Bring all the Housekeeping tasks into UC4

12. 12
Managed
and
Automated
by
UC4
New Setup

13. 13
What we do - Rollout
• Complete P4 environment
• Directories, binaries
• Config files
• Broker configs
• Reseed- and restore scripts
• In case a replica crashes, it can be reconfigured on new hardware in no time
• Triggers
• Binaries
• Trigger table
• P4 configureables
• Permissions
• Upgrade process
• Prod and test instances
• Either prod or test instance for all locations can be upgraded in one run

14. 14
What we do - Housekeeping
• Maintenance for all locations
• Log rotation
• Verify
• Replica sync
• Backups

15. 15
What we do – Health Check
• Monitoring for all locations checks, if
• Hosts online?
• UC4 Agents?
• RAID actice
• Disks mounted?
• Disk space
• Running processes (PIDs)
• CPU usage
• Mem usage
• Swap Usage
• Last run of maintenance scripts
• Pulling of archive files?
• Meta data current?
• SSH & public key
• P4 licenses
• Network interfaces
• P4 processes (p4 monitor show)
• None of the above checks was running more than an hour ago

16. 16
Some stats
• 33000 tasks/day
• As defined in around 170 UC4 Templates ootb
• Savings of 80% in Administration and Rollout
(while increasing Monitoring and Reliability)

17. 17
You Aint Seen Nothing Yet
• We also use UC4 to to manage the build
process of our software in close integration with
P4 (Build Triggers, Check-in of Build Artifacts)
• Additionally build artifacts are deployed
automatically by UC4, either from FS or from P4
• Integration with Ticket Systems/ALM tools are
possible to add further traceability

18. 18
Summary
• UC4 enables us to automate our P4 operations
• Not only Operations, but also Deployment and
Build processes are managed and automated
• UC4 and P4 are a first class DevOps toolset

19. 19
Questions?
Are you UC4 customer?
Bernhard.Burger@uc4.com
www.uc4.com