1. Continuous Deployment
Presented by Catalyst IT // Wednesday the 23rd of March 2016

2. Continuous Deployment
What?
Why?
What (I decided it is)
How!
Examples!
Why YOU

3. What is Continuous Deployment?
No one can agree!
Automated deployment after test pass?
Every change being able to be deployed to production?
Automating the deployment process?
Continuous Delivery!?

4. Why continuous deployment – For Catalyst?
Disagreements over packaging
Sysadmin type people availability
Unfriendly console driven processes
Desire for automated testing
Less need for special access to systems for special people

5. A way of no one fearing doing a deployment because it’s done so often
What I’ve decided it is
Enforced testing
Enforced use of revision control
Consistent view of deployment
A way of no one fearing doing a deployment because it’s done so often

6. Enforced testing – What?
A syntax check of all code
Becomes impossible to do a deployment with a syntax error
Developer has tested the part of the code they are working on most recently, forgot about other parts
Maybe check coding standards too?

7. Enforced testing – What?
Check any database schema changes actually work, upgrade script works
Check Moodle can install from scratch
Behat behaviour driven automated testing
Human approval by QA people

8. Enforced use of revision control
Only route to tests
Only route to deployment
No naughty ‘hacks on live’ that get forgotten about
Everyone can see who did what and when

9. How Continuous Deployment?
Scripts/Some crazy dev
C(r)apistrano
Driven from workstation
User required permissions on systems
Or a good tool
GoCD, Jenkins

10. Case Study One – Too much merging
Moodle fixes, individually don’t take long to git merge into a code branch site and commit the change
But if you have 60 or so Moodle based systems to update, it becomes a big boring job
Automate..
the merging of the updates from Moodle.org, the testing and the deployment
No deployment fear and time saved

14. Case study two – Multi-system dependency
We need to be able to deploy reliably a Moodle / Mahara combination
Check each version works with the other
Non-Standard Single Sign On system to also verify
Behat behaviour testing of SSO and other parts

17. Un-expected downsides
Developers get sad when they can’t use GoCD to deploy something
It did take quite a bit of time to iron out the bugs
That’s it

18. Things CD could do for you
Keep all your Moodles up to date (Eg, you have one per school)
Test integrations between Moodle and your bespoke systems
De-stress your developers who don’t like operating on production systems
De-stress your sysadmin types who are unfamiliar with Moodle
Or any of your other bespoke systems

19. Deploy to UAT / Staging with greater frequency
Unexpected benefits
Deploy to UAT / Staging with greater frequency
Customer can see fixes right away
We’ve had to make the final deployments work in a very reliably

20. Deploy to developer environments with CD as well
Things we could do
Feature toggles
We have different code on staging and production
Deploy to developer environments with CD as well

21. Things CD could do for you
Keep all your Moodles up to date (Eg, you have one per school)
Test integrations between Moodle and your bespoke systems
De-stress your developers who don’t like operating on production systems
De-stress your sysadmin types who are unfamiliar with Moodle
Or any of your other bespoke systems

22. http://tinyurl.com/h2mgskc - Great article
THE END
- Great article
I am: Simon Story –
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