Category Archives: Build

Continuous Integration Took Automation from Invention to Innovation

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While I can not take the credit for coming up with Continuous Integration (it can be traced back to timeless practices) or for even coining the term, I can take the credit for creating one of the first Open Source (later turned commercial) CI servers — Anthill, released in July of 2001. That has given me an almost unique vantage point for watching the evolution of CI and seeing it take the industry by storm. One of the most interesting phenomenon I have come across was seeing our customers use AnthillPro (back when it had build only functionality) to automate deployments back in 2004. Keep in mind that this was back in the days before the term Continuous Delivery was coined. At first it seemed to me that the wrong tool was being used for the job. But then I realized that the features present in any implementation of CI really advanced Automation from the invention stage to the innovation stage. Continue reading →

Customer Success Story: A DevOps Team by Any Other Name

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Provides Just as Much Value

I recently visited a customer and was surprised to learn just how sophisticated their IT operation is. They have a private cloud for Dev and Test and automated deployments (courtesy of AnthillPro) across all environments. The development and QA teams may request an environment for a specified period of time and then deploy their build to this environment for testing. This entire system, the environment provisioning and the application deployment is fully automated and turns what used to be a multi-week process into a one that literally takes minutes. BTW, these environments are non trivial as they are made up of multiple virtual machines along with network configuration, firewall rules, load balancing, edge caching, and more. Continue reading →

10,000 Builds a Month and Nobody Noticed

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Last week I was updating our website. I made some changes locally and committed them. A few minutes later, I was back at my desk after refreshing my coffee and immediately was concerned. My instant message client was not blinking as it should be. Where was my “build complete” notification? Where was the notification of deployment to test?

Concerned, I logged into AnthillPro and checked current activity. My build had just started, and there was a bit of a queue. No big deal, I was notified a few minutes later of completion. When the same thing happened the next day, I started to get curious since usually our build farm has plenty of capacity and queuing is rare. I checked the metrics. 10,000 builds in the last month. An average week day saw 400+ builds. I knew we were doing more and more, but that’s a crazy number. In simple CI where each commit triggers one build and each developer is committing about twice a day, 10k builds would be appropriate for 200 developers. We have less than that. Continue reading →

Configure a Multiplatform Build in AnthillPro

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A common build scenario is to need to compile on several different platforms. The basic build is all the same, but a couple parameters change platform to platform. Here we look at the basics of configuring this kind of scenario in AnthillPro.

You need:

  • A build job that is parameterized
  • A workflow that iterates over that build job for each platform
  • An agent filter that directs each iteration to the appropriate platform
  • Properties on the iteration that are the build job parameters and inform the filter

Webinar: Release Management Best Practices — Balancing Agility and Control

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Tomorrow (Wednesday Sept 9th) at 2 pm EDT / 11 am PDT Maciej Zawadzki and Damon Poole are going to be talking about Release Management Best Practices: Balancing Agility and Compliance.

The origin of this talk is the conflict we see in development organizations between the people who are trying hard to go faster, and the people who are trying hard to stay in control. There seems to be a fundamental tension between speed and safety… but in practice this is a false dichotomy. Automating manual tasks is a huge win both for time saved and for process enforced, for both Agility and auditing.

If you’d like to hear more you should Register Now and the join us Wednesday.