The Shippable Blog

In part I of my four part blog series on Microservices, I explained what microservices are and the benefits you will see by adopting this architecture.

However, life is all about tradeoffs. In part II of this series, I will go over the things you need to consider while moving to microservices, as well as some challenges that crop up even when you do everything right.

Microservices for greenfield projects

Anytime your team develops a new application from scratch, it feels great not to inherit technical debt and be locked into outdated decisions made years ago.  Most teams developing new apps today would probably choose to containerize them using Docker and adopt microservices architecture for speed and agility.

Microservices are the new cool kids in tech town and everyone's trying to join the party. After all, microservices are considered the panacea that brings speed, agility, and innovation to software powered businesses.

For the most part, this is true. In Part I of my four blog series, we will take a look at how software architecture has evolved over the years and why you should consider adopting microservices.

Provisioning and updating infrastructure is a the first step in setting up your development, beta, or production environments. Hasicorp's Terraform format is fast becoming very popular for this use case.  We love Terraform at Shippable due to its easy declarative syntax, similar to our pipelines syntax. Other advantages are: 

• Infrastructure as Code: Infrastructure is described using a high-level configuration syntax. This allows a blueprint of your datacenter to be versioned and treated as you would any other code. Additionally, infrastructure can be shared and re-used.

• Execution Plans: Terraform has a "planning" step where it generates anexecution plan. The execution plan shows what Terraform will do when you call apply. This lets you avoid any surprises when Terraform manipulates infrastructure.

• Resource Graph: Terraform builds a graph of all your resources, and parallelizes the creation and modification of any non-dependent resources. Because of this, Terraform builds infrastructure as efficiently as possible, and operators get insight into dependencies in their infrastructure.

• Change Automation: Complex changesets can be applied to your infrastructure with minimal human interaction. With the previously mentioned execution plan and resource graph, you know exactly what Terraform will change and in what order, avoiding many possible human errors.

At Shippable, we use Terraform to provision all our environments and automate the provisioning using our Pipelines feature. If you're interested in taking a look at our terraform scripts and pipelines config, we have made our repositories public so you can check them out:  

• Terraform scripts for test environments
• Pipelines config for automation

Interested in trying it yourself? The following example walks you through a sample project that provisions two t2.micro instances on AWS. We've kept it simple for easy understanding, but you can also automate provisioning of complex environments as seen in our beta infra scripts above.

As you know, we released our new implementation of continuous deployment pipelines last month. While our basic documentation is up to date, we believe that learning the new pipelines is best done with quick tutorials that demonstrate the power of CD and how easy it is to get started.

We have created a sample project and sample configuration to deploy the project to a test environment,  create a release with semantic versioning, and deploy the project to production. The entire end to end scenario should take less than 30 mins to try out and while you won't learn every little trick, it will definitely make you comfortable with the configuration and how to set things up.

So read on and try it out!

SEATTLE, WA (Aug 25, 2016) Shippable has announced the next generation of its continuous deployment platform. The enhanced platform adds key features like release management, multi-cloud capabilities, a declarative pipeline language and a unified view across all application pipelines. These features help software-powered organizations further streamline the process of shipping software and accelerating innovation.

Today, most organizations find it challenging to innovate fast enough to satisfy consumers. DevOps is a set of principles that tries to solve this problem. However, the workflow required to get applications from source code to running in production is complicated and riddled withfragmented technology solutions. The only way to achieve rapid, iterative innovation is to cobble these fragments together in one continuous pipeline. Unfortunately, these custom, homegrown pipelines are rigid, inflexible and hard to maintain. The do-it-yourself approach is a distraction and takes valuable cycles away from product engineering.

Shippable’s integrated platform is built from the ground up to defragment and streamline the process of shipping applications, so that software-powered organizations can accelerate innovation.