One Stop multi stage CI / CD with fabric8 and Chat
So earlier today with a couple of clicks on a web console I created an iPaaS project, it was generated, committed to Gogs source control, it’s Jenkins CI and CD pipeline created, triggered, artifacts built into to Nexus, released, automated integration test run, Kubernetes configuration generated, environments built, deployed to staging, I was notified which I approved so that my new project was deployed to production.. all in under a minute. Simply astonishing.
fabric8’s aim is to help any developer / team / organisation that wants to work with containers. We realised that CD is one areas that customers were using fabric8v1 but the integration with VCS’s, SCM’s, CI systems, issue trackers took a huge amount of time and resources not only to create but also maintain. Even when these were in place there was little visibility provided so environment ownership, social conflicts and human approval made any continuous delivery solution have bottlenecks and cause massive delays. Add this to the microservices wave, there’s a huge demand for more and more new projects, new jobs for CI tooling such as Jenkins, code review like Gerrit, QA such as Sonarqube and we’ve not even started with Continuous Delivery yet!
What was clear was we needed automation that also prepared everyone involved in making a feature go live, with the necessary level of information and confidence that they could simply review and click a button or reply to a chat notification to approve. Leveraging OpenShift and or Kubernetes we are now able to pull all of these familiar, de facto and successful OSS projects into one platform and even run them in one Vagrant image to test. Added to that we have automated the OSS webhook integrations and project setup so with only a few options via the integrated fabric8 webconsole (these options are of course entirely extendable) we can create a full CI and CD pipeline with notifications and human approval via chat tools like Lets Chat or Slack with only a couple of clicks.
Want to chat to your butler? Here’s how..
Initially there will probably be a familiarity to Java developers because of the great development tooling we have http://fabric8.io/guide/tools.html. In fact if you are a Java developer wanting to work with Kubernetes fabric8 really is the easiest and quickest way to get going. The CD feature however will work for anyone as it uses the extremely powerful Cloudbees docker workflow plugin.
By pulling together these household OSS projects onto one platform we can provide a consistent and familiar way of working which can reduce the risk of adopting Continuous Delivery. We are able to leverage the hugely successfully and growing Jenkins ecosystem as well as provide the levels of automation that leave users in control, comfortable that their CI ad CD builds are repeatable and when we tie this into the larger fabric8 DevOps platform (more info coming soon) then we have the ability to analyse, understand and continually improve.
