Continual Integration Development and the Cloud
One of the big buzz phrases at the moment seems to be Continual Integration Development. If you’re developing and wanting to deploy ‘as the features are ready’, and you have a cloud you have two main options, which both have pros and con’s but:
New Image per Milestone
Most cloud systems work by you taking an ‘image’ of a pre-setup machine, then booting new instances of these images. Each time you get to a milestone, you setup a new image, and then setup your auto scaling system to launch these instances rather then the old one, but you have to shut down all your old images and bring them up as new ones.
Pro’s: The machines come up in the new state quickly.
Con’s: For each deployment, you have to do quite a bit more work making the new image. Each deployment requires shutting down all the old images and bringing up new replacements.
SCM Pull on Boot
Make one image, and give it access to your SCM (i.e. git / svn etc). Build in a boot process that brings up the service but also fetches the most recent copy of the ‘live’ branch.
Pro’s: You save a lot of time in deployments – deployments are triggered by people committing to the live branch, rather then by system administrators performing the deployments. Because they are running SCM, updating all the currently running images is as simple as just running the fetch procedure again.
Con’s: You do need to maintain two branches: a live and a dev branch, and merge (some SCM’s might not like this). Also, your SCM hosting has to be able to cope with when you get loads (i.e. when new computers get added). Your machines come up a little slower as they have to do the fetch before they are usable.
I opted for the second route: we use Git, so we can clone quickly to the right branch. We’ve also added in git hooks that make sure any setup procedures (copying the right settings file in) are done when the computer comes up. Combining this with a fabric script to update all the currently running boxes is a dream.