UPDATE: The book I mentioned, Continuous Delivery with Windows and .NET, by Chris O’Dell and Matthew Skelton, can be found here.
On a lovely warm Thursday evening in May I returned to the speaker’s floor and presented a great session on Continuous Integration, Delivery and Deployment, to a fantastic group of developers at DevSouthCoast in Southampton.
The main takeaways from the session are all about how easy CI, CDel and CDep can be to get going, as well as how you can start the process off for free using popular, industry-used products. One of the most exciting parts of this session for me is that everything about the session is live. Using two VMs I replicate a standard setup – installing and configuring the applications right there on the session floor. Whilst the progress bars load I talk about how the applications I’ve chosen will help the process flow and what they bring to the Continuous party,
Through the power of MeetUp attendees can comment on the session afterwards which is great, as I can take the feedback and improve the talk for next time, and I’m grateful for everyone that has done so.
From the comments left I have picked out two that add some more content to the talk and give some great user experiences. The first is from Ian Mayo, the second from Mike Blake.
Phil’s a great speaker – I look forward to his return.
Interesting subject area. It certainly was a challenge to balance the demonstration with the introduction to CI/CD. Hopefully the “feat” of CD in 90 minutes will show it’s not intimidating, and will encourage DevSouthCoast members to try to configure CI right at the start of their next project – when the build is nice & simple, rather than as a “big hit” once the project is mature with lots of build complexities.
Personally, I’ve had a great time with Travis-CI hooking direct into GitHub, with over 2000 builds in the last 18 months: https://travis-ci.org/debrief/debrief/builds
Introducing CI in “the cloud” took only about 10 mins. But, I’m in the Open Source domain, and don’t have to work “on-premise”.
Great meetup. Couple of minor links we have used:
New Agents add 10 configs for £236+VAT
https://www.jetbrains.com/teamcity/buy/#license-type=new-licenseYou can use git flow so each branch and PR is built before it’s merged
https://blogs.endjin.com/2013/03/a-step-by-step-guide-to-using-gitflow-with-teamcity-part-1-different-branching-models/You can use ** to run all Test dlls
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5646598/how-can-i-run-all-nunit-tests-in-team-cityYou can start and stop agents on demand in the cloud using VM images
http://blog.jetbrains.com/teamcity/2014/11/introducing-teamcity-azure-plugin-run-builds-in-the-cloud/SSL Agents are hard to setup due to the Java certs
https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/TW-12976You can link TeamCity to You Track
https://confluence.jetbrains.com/display/TCD9/YouTrack
Mike makes some great points – and to pick out just a couple, you can add more build configurations to your TeamCity instance for a much smaller amount of money than an enterprise license. Whilst TeamCity will give you 20 build configurations as part of the initial free bundle there will come a point where you need more and this is a great saving on the full license cost. Secondly, whilst it was mentioned in the session Mike thankfully provides a link for it, in that you can link TeamCity to YouTrack to provide the flow of data back to a ticket to indicate a fix-in-build.
Ian has been using Travis-CI to connect into his GitHub repos, linking together two great SaaS products to provide his CI pipeline. With nothing to install and the two systems already prep’d to talk to each other it’s one of the easiest ways to get started. He’s also right to suggest that it’s much easier to employ a Continuous Integration and Delivery or Deployment pipeline at the beginning of a project. Some great advice.