DevOps in the Cloud

Screencast on Scripted Infrastructure with AWS CloudFormation and Chef

 

One-minute Screencast on using Cloud ROI Calculator

A one-minute screencast on using the Cloud ROI Calculator to determine the costs between a Automated Cloud Operations team and a Traditional Operations team.

 

Fire your 1990s-style Operations Team

A brief conversation between a developer and a Systems Engineer who still runs his systems like it was 1995...

  

Developer: I would like a target environment created for me.

Operations: You need to send an email and we will get back to you in a day or so.

Developer: Ok, sending the email now.

Operations: Thanks for the email. Please send us your requirements including your overall architectural approach.

Developer: Ok, here are our requirements and architecture

Operations: Now, we need to get approval from management.

Operations: Ok, we need to schedule a meeting to go over your requirements

Operations: Now that we've had the meeting, we need to schedule a time to setup the servers and environment. This will take a couple of days.

Developer: So, to get one environment it takes 40 hours of actual time and one week of wait time? I'm going to the Cloud and using a provisioning application so that I can get my environment in minutes instead of weeks!

 

Screencast on AWS Elastic Beanstalk

Amazon Web Services released their Platform as a Service offering on Wednesday, January 19th. I've gotten an opportunity to play with it and I'm quite impressed. I created a seven-minute screencast that takes you through the steps to deploy and configure an application/environment using Elastic Beanstalk. In this screencast, you'll see how easy it was to get a Hudson CI server up and running in an EC2 environment. Furthermore, Elastic Beanstalk provides automatic scaling, monitoring, configuration right 'out of the box'. It's worth checking out.

 

Continuous Integration as a Service Beta Now Available

Deploy working software at the click of a button

We are pleased to announce the release of our CI as a Service product from Stelligent. Using Continuous Integration as a Service, you get running with CI along with a complete development environment stack in minutes and manage it. Moreover, you have full unfettered access to the instance. You can start and stop fully configured virtual instances at any time.

The tool installs and configures the Hudson CI server, MySQL database, Subversion, Ant, Maven, Java and all other necessary tools to create and manage working software at the click of a button. It also runs a one-click build and deployment of working software from source code. At Stelligent, we use the CI as a Service to create working software from our SVN version-control repository - on demand.

See the video that demonstrates how to start using CI as a Service. The basic steps are:

1. Click the "Try it Out" button from the Stelligent website.
2. Enter your email address and password and click the Give me CI button.
3. Review the price information and click the Purchase button
4. You will receive an confirmation page. From this page, you can click the Download Key button to download your private key to access your virtual instance or monitor your CI instances.
5. In about 15 minutes, you will receive an email with links to your provisioned virtual instance and running Hudson Continuous Integration server

At this point, you have a fully-configured CI environment. Moreover, you have full access to this instance to configure as you please. No need to negotiate with your Systems/Operations team or wait for them to provision an environment. Build and deploy your software in a clean environment at a moment's notice. Sign up for the beta of CI as a Service and let us know your experiences with it.

CI as a Service is a product and accompanying service offering from Stelligent. Our CEO literally wrote the book on Continuous Integration. We are passionate about helping our customers automate the entire software delivery process to get software to users more quickly.

Video: Use a Continuous Integration server - with Hudson

It's been a while since I posted new videos to http://integratebutton.com/, but here's a new one on Using a CI server (with Hudson). This video demonstrates the Use a CI server practice from the book, Continuous Integration: Improving Software and Reducing Risk.

I don't spend any time in this video "discussing" the why behind CI, just how to get it up and running with Hudson using the example files located at http://code.google.com/p/brewery-ci/.

I cover how to use scripts I provide to download, install and configure Hudson and Tomcat, run an HSQL database, run an Ant automated build, use Subversion to manage source files and administer the Hudson web application. Please note that there is no sound in this video. I've used text throughout the video to describe what I'm doing on the screen. It lasts approximately 7 minutes. Hope you enjoy it!