Presentation on Continuous Deployment with Deployit that Vincent Partington gave at the BCS CMSG conference in London on June the 7th 2011. http://www.bcs-cmsg.org.uk/conference2011/conference.html

1. Implementing Continuous Deployment
seamless application deliveries with a DevOps mindset
xebialabs.com
Vincent Partington
CTO & Co-founder XebiaLabs

2. Introduction
• Vincent Partington, CTO XebiaLabs.
• Deployit, Deployment Automation solution.
• On Java EE platforms and related platforms.
• IBM WebSphere, Oracle WebLogic, JBoss, Tomcat, and others.
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3. Agenda
• Application deployment challenges.
• Definition of continuous deployment.
• Prerequisites for continuous deployment.
• So how does it work?
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4. Application deployment challenges
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5. Application deployment challenges
• More frequent application releases because of:
• Increasing business demands
• Agile development methods
• More and more environments because of:
• More middleware technology added
• Cloud infrastructure
• This means more and more deployments.
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6. What is application deployment?
• Deployment is about making an application available to end users:
• Application delivered by development team.
• Application installed by operations team.
• Or: Stop servers, install artifacts, configure resources, start servers, etc.
• Or: Read The Fine (60 page) Manual.
• Or: Ask the developer.
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7. Current deployment practices
• Two manual processes:
• Hand-over from development to operations.
• Manual deployment procedures followed by developers and/or
operations.
• The first is time-consuming, the second is error-prone.
• Typical IT answer: Automation!
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8. Current IT landscape
Change Configuration
Management Management
Continuous Build
Bamboo,
Hudson…
IDEs SCM
RAD, ClearCase, Release
Management Scripts
Eclipse… SVN...
Interactive Build
Maven, Ant…
Monitoring
HP Tivoli,…
Largely
Largely automated automated
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9. Deployment automation features
• Standard format for delivery by development.
• Integration with developer tools.
• Integration with target middleware.
• Integration with operations tools.
• Role-based security.
• Reporting on history and current state.
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10. DevOps
• Movement started out of disappointment with the current state of
affairs in IT: fear of change, risky deployments, “works on my machine”
attitude, silo’s.
• About applying agile principles to IT operations:
• Multidisciplinary teams: dev and ops together.
• Focus on end-result, working in increments.
• Automation where possible (Forrester: “NoOps”).
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11. So what is
Continuous Deployment?
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12. Continuous integration
• Emerged at the end of the ‘90s as one of the XP practices.
• By continuously building and testing software quality should improve.
• Tests are often limited to unit tests (e.g. JUnit).
• Sometimes functional tests are included too (e.g. Selenium).
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13. Shortcomings of most CI setups
• Deployment to the target platform is often not part of the CI cycle.
• That means: deployment procedures are not tested.
• And that means: application is not tested on target platform.
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14. So what is continuous deployment?
• Strictest definition:
• Every (tagged) version goes straight into production.
• Used by LinkedIn amongst others.
• Less strict:
• Include deployment automation the CI cycle to test the deployed
artifact.
xebialabs.com

15. Prerequisites for
Continuous Deployment
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16. Standard delivery format
Deployment Package
Manifest
Artifacts (Java EE, HTML, etc.)
Configuration files
Middleware resources
Post-deployment tests
Dependencies
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17. Environments
Environment
Appserver Message ...
Broker
Database Auth. Proxy
HTTP Server Host
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18. Application deployments
Application Environment
Application Environment
Application Environment
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19. Deployment customization
• At deployment time, not at build time!
• In artifacts and in configurations.
• Property replacement for configurations.
• Placeholder replacement for artifact contents.
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20. Deployment customization
- SERVICE.URL = http://app-test.mycompany.com
EAR Ear to AppServ
er
Application
server
r
to Appserve
Datasource
Datasource
- username = u_app_test_env
- jndi = jdbc/myAppDS - password = ********
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21. Demo
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22. Setup
IDE CI system Deployit
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Version Build Application
control system server
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23. Advantages
• Application is automatically tested on target platform after every
modification.
• Developers can no longer ignore deployment.
• Increase of quality.
• Same deployment automation can be used to deploy to acceptance and
production environments.
• Less hand-over moments.
• Increate of speed, and quality.
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24. More info
• Visit our website at http://www.xebialabs.com
• Follow us on Twitter: @XebiaLabs
• Follow me on Twitter: @vpartington
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