Visualising Continuous Deployment

An excellent lean coach at my workplace encouraged me to post this quick article about how  [macro|micro]-services teams can quickly visualise how successful their continuous deployment implementation is.    A picture says a thousand words and all that…so

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I forgot to grab a snap of it today, here’s one Gus posted earlier this week.  I’ll add more

Too many teams too few monitors

We had 10 teams all trying to integrate, normally we could list 5/6 teams vertically using the standard Jenkins BuildPipeline View – but we were short on real estate here – apparently a ticket to solve it was floating around somewhere 😉

To conserve space I checked out a copy of Dashing and re-organised the screen into what you see now, but with just three colours:

• Red: Build has failed
• Grey: Building
• Light Green: No current failures

But.. I got a lot of questions, just general confusion.  So I added the Production version to the screen too; indicating x.x.x was successfully deployed to Prod.  It still lacked something though, you glanced at it and came away more confused than you were to start.

What message is it supposed to impart ?

This got me thinking, we’re an CI/CD driven floor –  what we really need to know is how much we are honouring this principle –

is the latest stable build in Production?

 

 More colours to the rescue

• Red: Build has failed – stage indicated – e.g. Acceptance (probably Cloudtsack ;-))
• Grey: Building with % indicator
• *Light Green: All Good, last stable build is in Production
• Less Light Green:  Could be better, maybe 2/3 stable builds since Prod release
• Getting Yellow:  More work to be done here
• Yellowy: 5+ stable builds since last release – let the floggings commence

*Colours are near values, it’s a (dodgy) function mapping the distance to an RGB value.

Now it seems to relay more information, I can quickly see which teams are making good progress  – there’s probably a lot more you could do with this.

 

Latest Buildbot (0.9.0b6) on CentOS 7

Shortly after I wrote that last post, I realised there was a newer version of  Buildbot, and it has a far nicer UI. I’ve linked to the new Dockerfiles below.

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The main changes in the Dockerfile are

• forcing a version from pip
• manually installing waterfall & console plugins

The main changes in the master.cfg are:

• Removing old WWW config
• Removing old Auth settings

Both of the above are replaced by a short block of code:

# www

c['buildbotURL'] = "http://localhost:8020/"

c['www'] = dict(port=8020,
 plugins=dict(waterfall_view={}, console_view={}))

which is enabled by a new Web Server module. Note the port change.

New Master Dockerfile, no change to slave: http://pastebin.com/Gz30Qe0f